
Class _J 

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New Wine Skins 



PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS 



LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE MAINE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE 

JIT COBB DIVINITY SCHOOL, LEIVISTOCK, ME. 

SEPTEMBER 3-8, 1900 



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BOSTON, MASS. : 

THE MORNING STAR PUBLISHING HOUSE 

457 Shawmut Avenue. 

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LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

JAN 28 1909 

. Copyrififtt Entry 
CLASS <x XXc- No 
COPY t3. v 



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Copyright, 1901 
By Morning Star Publishing House 



TO 

THOSE WHO 

IN THE VINTAGE OF CHRISTIAN 

EXPERIENCE AND GROWTH 

FIND 

A NEW WINE 

NEEDING NEW BOTTLES. 



Preface 



FEW READERS of this book will need to be 
reminded that its title is derived from the words 
of Jesus, " Neither do men put new wine into old 
wine-skins, else the skins burst, and the wine 
is spilled, and the skins perish; but they put new 
wine into fresh wine-skins, and both are pre- 
served." (Matt. 9: 17, Revised Version.) 

Truth to a truth-seeker is always new. Even 
the familiar becomes daily better understood and 
thus renews its freshness. Daily then his wine 
is vinted. 

He cannot employ his former receptacles; for 
then his new conceptions dwindle to the limits of 
the old and, losing freshness, become cant. But 
expression must vary in order to preserve the 
novelty of the truth. This reconstruction of the 
expression is the preparation of new wine skins 
for the new truth. 



vi PREFACE 

The lectures in the following pages touch a 
variety of subjects, but are all united in this ; 
each discovers a modern phase of the century-old 
revelation, and shows its adaptation to present 
conditions and needs of man. Each, therefore, 
discovers a new wine which it seeks to preserve 
in a new wine skin. 

Man, also, will be found to be the point of 
departure in each lecture for the investigation and 
application of truth. A social theology, when 
unexpressed, is yet implied. The lecturers are 
humanitarian. Their recognition of God is that 
he is amongst men and still revealing himself to 
men, and still working for men. The historic 
point of view involves confidence in a living, im- 
manent Deity. 

These lectures are gathered from courses deliv- 
ered at the Maine Ministers' Institute, held each 
fall since 1895 at Cobb Divinity School, Lewis- 
ton, Maine. Eight of the present lectures were 
given at the session of 1900, and two (IV and 
VII) at the session of 1899. 



TREFACE vii 

The faculty of Cobb Divinity School and the 
readers of these pages are indebted to the lectur- 
ers whose busy hands and generous hearts have 
permitted their manuscripts to go in this form 
before a larger audience. 

Alfred Williams Anthony. 

Lewiston, Me., April, igoi. 



Contents 



SOCIOLOGY, THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN SOCIETY 
Lecture Page 

I. THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 15 
II. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 37 

III. THE SOCIAL FORCES 63 

By Rev. J. H. W. Stuckenberg, D.D., LL. D. 

THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION 

IV. SCIENCE AND RELIGION 93 

By Professor F. C. Robinson, A. M. 

V. HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN 

FAITH 127 

By Rev. C. S. Patton, A. M. 

THE PROBLEM OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION 

VI. ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METH- 

OD IN STUDYING THE OLD TESTA- 
MENT 149 

By Rev. A. T. Salley, D. D. 

VII. THE HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE NEW 

TESTAMENT EVANGEL 167 

By Professor A. W. Anthony, A. M. 



x CONTENTS 

THE PROBLEM OF PRACTICAL WORK. 

VIII. The Minister's personality and 

Methods 195 

By Rev. C. S. Patton, A. M. 

IX. METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 227 

By Professor B. F. Hayes, D. D. 

X. OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH OF 

TO-DAY . . . 283 

By Rev. C. M. Sheldon, A. M. 



Sociology, the Science of 
Human Society 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF 
SOCIOLOGY 



REV. J. H. W. STUCKENBERG, D. D., LL. D. 

Author of "An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy." "An Introduc- 
tion to the Study of Sociology," " The Social Problem," etc. 
Cambridge, Mass, 



The Meaning and Scope of Sociology 



Sociology belongs to that large class of sciences 
designated human in distinction from the natural 
sciences; and among the human sciences it 
belongs to those which pertain to society, not 
to isolated individuals. 

We shall be the better prepared for the appre- 
ciation of sociology if we consider 

I. The Study of Society. 

Man's interest in man is natural. His love of 
self need but be expanded to become the basis of 
an affinity with those like himself, especially with 
those whose kinship is recognized. From the 
earliest to the latest recorded sayings respecting 
man we find that, so far as he was at all a 
student, he made himself an object of chief con- 
sideration. The statement that he is made in 
the image of God gives him the preeminence 
among earthly beings and entitles him to special 
inquiry. "Know thyself,'* written over the 
entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, was 
a saying deemed worthy of a divine origin and 
was heralded as the culmination of Greek wis- 
dom ; and its endless repetition by eastern sages 
and western philosophers, in ancient and modern 
times, proves in what estimation it is held. 



16 SiEW WINE SKINS 

Emphasis is given to the same thought by Pope's 
epigram, " The proper study of mankind is man," 
and by that of a French writer, " Man himself is 
the science of man." 

In the past, however, the individual human 
being has been the chief object of study. Only 
in recent times society became the focus of atten- 
tion and the subject for continuous, systematic, 
and cumulative investigation. It is not meant 
that society was wholly ignored formerly, but 
that its investigation was spasmodic and by iso- 
lated thinkers. Besides, it was not society as a 
whole that was investigated, but particular soci- 
eties or certain phases of society, such as the 
family, the church, and the state, laws, politics, 
ecclesiastical institutions, economic conditions, 
and social reforms. That society in its most 
comprehensive sense is a web in which these 
social forms and phases are but the threads was 
overlooked. Valuable social thoughts are scat- 
tered through the centuries in numerous writings, 
such as the sacred scriptures of oriental peoples, 
the "Republic " of Plato, the " Politics " of Aris- 
totle, Augustine's "City of God," More's 
" Utopia," and Campanella's " City of the Sun." 
But society as a totality and inclusive of all human 
associations was not grasped, its numerous pro- 
cesses were not explained, and a complete sys- 
tem or science of society was out of the ques- 
tion. 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 17 

We must distinguish between society itself and 
the consciousness which men have of society. 
What society actually is and what men think of 
it may be two very different things. Society 
long existed before men reflected on it or were 
aware of what it is and involves. Even now 
intelligent men move in society without knowing 
what social forces they exert and are subject to, 
and without the ability to define society. Soci- 
ology simply aims to make the student fully 
conscious of the social actuality. All develop- 
ment of knowledge consists in making us aware 
of a reality of which formerly we were not 
aware. 

Originally men were prone to resort to fiction 
for an interpretation of fact. Mysteries were 
explained by accident or chance, a demon or 
a ghost. It took a long time to get to reality for 
the explanation of reality. Some peoples pass 
through a long process of evolution before they 
learn that every change must have a cause ; and 
until that is learned no real explanation of social 
phenomena can be expected. 

When society did arrest the attention it was 
not its nature which was first studied ; that was 
the last to be investigated. Men were attracted 
by social facts, by the benefits to be derived from 
co-operation in the chase, the industries, and 
war, by social ranks, castes, slavery, and by 
natural grouping for various purposes. Practice 



18 weiv mm SKINS 

precedes science. Notions of right and wrong 
grow out of experience and result in practical 
rules before the science of ethics appears ; 
numerous experiments are made by states before 
Aristotle writes on political science ; religious 
practices precede theology; and the practical 
movements of society arrested the attention 
many years before the science of society was 
attempted. 

It would be interesting to trace the slow process 
by which man learns that law prevails in any 
department. The failure to recognize the fact 
that it is found in human affairs was one of the 
strongest hindrances to the thorough study of 
society. The reign of law was observed in 
nature while social phenomena were still thought 
to be haphazard and therefore unaccountable. 
Very slowly has the recognition of law in human 
society become prevalent in modern times. It 
was only a century ago that Herder wondered 
whether society is not subject to law as well 
as natural objects, and therefore an object of 
scientific interpretation. Vico, Montesquieu, and 
others were his forerunners in this inquiry. 
So long as God was believed to shape arbi- 
trarily human destiny a science of society 
could not be attempted ; nor would this be un- 
dertaken while the belief prevailed that man's 
earthly existence has significance only as a 
preparation for heaven. Secular society was 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 19 

not deemed worthy of study for its own sake. 
Augustine regarded it as a product of sin and 
of alienation from God. With heaven as every- 
thing and the earth as of little value, it was 
natural to concentrate attention on spiritual things 
and neglect the earthly conditions of man. Be- 
sides, personal religion was emphasized to the 
neglect of social religion ; hence personal ascet- 
icism and hermit life and the reign of religious 
individualism. 

The multitude of erroneous views to be over- 
come were not, however, the only obstacles in 
the way of the deeper study of society. The 
past social condition belongs to the chief barriers. 
Society itself, aside from a few prominent social 
structures, was too little developed to arrest the 
attention and seem worthy of special investi- 
gation. So long as in ancient despotisms the 
state absorbed society no other association could 
attain prominence. Voluntary associations were 
not lacking in Greece ; but the state dominated 
the social life too completely to leave room for 
great extra - political organizations. Socrates 
protests that he is innocent, yet refuses to seize 
the opportunity to escape, and drinks the hemlock 
because he regards the will of the state supreme 
and final. Various kinds of societies also flour- 
ished in Rome ; but the dominating idea of that 
mighty people was civil power. Not voluntary 
organizations, but its army, its laws and politics, 



20 SKEW WINE SKINS 

gave to Rome its place in history. In the Middle 
Ages the church often contested the supremacy 
of the political organization, sometimes ruling the 
state, sometimes allied with it; but voluntary 
societies did not become prominent as compared 
with church and state. 

To explain the changes which have taken place 
in society since the Middle Ages would require a 
full account of the origin and development of the 
forces which have produced the modern era, such 
as the evolution of the modern states from feudal- 
ism ; the Renaissance, with its revival and spread 
of classical and especially Greek literature ; the 
invention of printing and its effect on learning ; 
the larger conception of the world and humanity 
gained by the discovery of America and the 
ocean route to India; the Reformation; the 
development of science since the time of Coper- 
nicus; and the general enlargement of thought 
and of human freedom. The church had been 
divided, so that two great ecclesiastical societies 
now confronted each other. Travel and the 
growing intercourse between nations also made 
other religions than Christianity objects of in- 
quiry. With the American and French Revolu- 
tions the people assumed the authority which form- 
erly coerced them without their consent. The 
sovereignty of the people opened the way for 
numerous voluntary associations as the embodi- 
ment of their wishes and expression of their will. 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 21 

The church and state were not abolished, but they 
ceased to have a monopoly of society and were 
themselves transformed by the growing power of 
the people. 

Taking account of all that led up to the nine- 
teenth century as a preparation for sociology, we 
must look to that century itself for the conditions 
which made the science of society possible. Not 
only have the advances of natural science during 
that century been marvelous but also obtrusive. 
Its discoveries were striking, the inventions to 
which it gave birth have wrought wonders. For 
a while it actually seemed as if the great study of 
mankind would be nature instead of man. Sci- 
entists like Buechner and Haeckel claim the 
century for the science of nature, and think that 
the twentieth century will be the era of social 
science. But while less palpable and less strik- 
ing, the progress of the human sciences has been 
very marked and in some instances may dispute 
the claim to supremacy with the science of 
nature. During the nineteenth century the sci- 
ence of language was created. Such progress has 
been made in history, evolution itself being but 
one of its phases, that the claim is made that the 
nineteenth should be called the historical century. 
Never before has an equal amount of attention 
been devoted to economics and politics, ethics 
and theology, and in each the progress has been 
great. Psychology has become a new science and 



22 U^EJV WINE SKINS 

education has been revolutionized. Anthropology, 
ethnography, ethnology, and demography are 
recent creations. Indeed, if for awhile the sci- 
ence of nature threatened to absorb everything, 
we are warranted in saying that now the era of 
the human sciences has fully come, with a 
marked emphasis on such as treat of men in 
association. 

The nineteenth has been called the century of 
organization and the era when the power of 
organization was discovered. The numerous 
voluntary associations which have arisen give 
a new significance to society, a wider meaning 
than as merely inclusive of the family, the 
church, and the state. In Turkey and Russia 
the government controls society ; in the western 
states the people as a body or society virtually 
control the government. In republics the people 
make the state and determine its management. 
Societies of all kinds flourish, political, economic, 
religious, artistic, and literary. Every important 
idea, interest, and purpose can be made the 
nucleus of an association. Society has thus 
received a new meaning, its functions have been 
increased, its importance has become evident to 
scholars, and its exhaustive treatment involves 
much more than ecclesiastical and political dis- 
cussions. 

Even if thinkers had neglected social affairs 
the masses emphasized them. Socialistic and 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 23 

communistic theories already appeared during the 
French Revolution, and since then every enlight- 
ened land has witnessed the agitation and up- 
rising of the masses. From France, the land of 
unrest and revolutionary theories, the leaven 
spread to England, Germany, and all over the 
continent. The masses had become conscious of 
inalienable rights, of the claims of the person- 
ality and of the dignity of man as man. Prom- 
inent lessons of equality and human worth had 
their source in the Gospel and were proclaimed 
from the pulpit. In some of the continental 
countries of Europe socialism has become so 
mighty a force that it has been proposed to call 
the nineteenth the socialistic century. 

Deeper and more quiet has been the work of 
social students intent on the scientific interpreta- 
tion of society. Comte, inventor of the term 
" sociology" as well as that of "altruism," laid the 
basis for the science of society, contributed valu- 
able material for its construction, and gave a 
strong impulse to its further development. He 
has been followed by a long list of sociologists 
in France and other continental countries, in 
England and America. All past study of society 
has thus culminated in an earnest effort to con- 
struct sociology, the science of human society. 
Only in a very general way can the present 
status of the study of society be indicated. 

a. Society is now definitely before the student. 



24 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

This means that to the family, the state, and the 
church have been added social groups and com- 
munities, innumerable voluntary associations, 
and already beginnings have been made to estab- 
lish a society of nations. Humanity in its asso- 
ciated capacity has come into view. Ours has 
been called the " epoch of humanity." 

b. The value of society is being realised. In 
union there is strength. Cooperation, syndi- 
cates, combinations of capitalists and of laborers, 
the union of churches, are regarded as important 
aids in solving weighty social problems. Legis- 
lation is prized as the power of the collectivity to 
promote municipal, state, and national welfare. 
Emphasis is placed on social politics, politics based 
on the needs of society at large, and far more 
worthy than partisan politics. The individual 
himself is more and more viewed as a social 
product, the result of heredity and social environ- 
ment. 

c. The responsibility of society is recognised. 
Schiller declared our indebtedness to society so 
great that our utmost efforts cannot pay it. 
"Society makes criminals," has become a com- 
mon statement. The slums, the saloons, and all 
dens of iniquity are created and fostered by com- 
munities, municipalities ; those who tolerate them 
share the guilt of their existence. It is now 
admitted that individual and social redemption 
involve each other. 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 25 

d. Society is clearly apprehended as an object of 
scientific investigation. On this theory numerous 
valuable works have already appeared, particu- 
larly in the French, English, German, and Italian 
languages. Yet it can hardly be claimed that 
more than a fair beginning has been made. 
Sociology is the science of the future rather than 
of the past. 

II. What is Sociology? 

The definition of sociology as the science of 
society answers this question only in the most 
general way. What society is and in what sense 
it is subject to scientific treatment must be de- 
termined. In the next two lectures the nature 
of society will be investigated. 

Like every new science, sociology is still in its 
tentative stage. In idea, not in realization, is it 
a science. 

The confusion prevailing in the use of the term 
sociology is bewildering. It is taken in so many 
different senses as to rob it of specific content 
and aim. Frequently it is made the receptacle 
for all kinds of social facts and inquiries. Books 
and lectures on labor problems, on slums, on 
sanitation, on poverty and its relief, on legislation 
to improve the condition of the poorer classes, are 
called sociological. Sociology has thus come to 
mean largely social pathology. Even in institu- 
tions of learning the term is made to cover a 
striking heterogeneity of scholarly and practical 



26 tKElV WINE SKINS 

subjects. Some phases of the endless variety of 
social factors or movements are investigated and 
dubbed sociological. As a consequence, when a 
writer or lecturer on sociology is mentioned it is 
by no means clear what he discusses. Perhaps 
he is a socialist rather than a sociologist. 

By defining sociology as the science of society 
much material is excluded which is generally 
designated sociological. Social details are essen- 
tial ; but they are studied for the sake of the 
science they involve. The immediate aim is not 
practical ; but when the science of society has 
been constructed its application will be of the 
utmost value for social reform. Indeed, it seems 
strange that men should attempt the reconstruc- 
tion of society before they study its nature and 
the method of its operations. 

Society is the subject-matter of sociology. So- 
ciety itself is to be interpreted, not merely certain 
forms, movements, and details of society. Social 
facts are gathered and classified for the sake of 
explaining the society from which they emanate. 
Since sociology specializes on society, it leaves to 
other studies all questions not pertaining to the 
specific object of its specialization. Its purpose 
being scientific, it seeks social principles, causes, 
and laws, and aims to combine all in a system 
worthy of being called the science of society. 

Sociology becomes vast and difficult enough by 
making the scientific interpretation of society its 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 27 

aim. But this aim has been complicated by- 
following various side-issues in which the specific 
aim was lost sight of. Comte, under the influ- 
ence of a materialistic philosophy, called sociology 
social physics, and sought to absorb psychology 
in phrenology, physiology, and biology. Herbert 
Spencer seeks to evolve from matter, force, and 
motion, pronounced absolutely unknowable, all 
that is knowable. Instead of trying to get to 
social interpretation by means of Comte's ■' Posi- 
tive Philosophy" or Spencer's "Synthetic Phil- 
osophy/ ' it is more scientific to go directly to so- 
ciety itself to learn its nature. The task of the 
sociologist is hopeless if, as has heretofore so 
often been the case, he must first determine what 
is knowable and what unknowable, what matter 
and spirit are, and their relation to each other, and 
questions of monism and dualism, of freewill and 
determinism, of atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, 
and theism. The ultimate problems must be 
left to philosophy or metaphysics or theology, 
where they belong, while sociology confines 
itself strictly to society. 

The exact meaning of society being the first 
aim, it must be differentiated from the individual 
and from natural objects ; its idea must be found, 
its essence must be seized. The problem is : 
What must be, in order that society may be ? In 
societies we want to discover society, that which 
is common to all. In the notion of tree there is 



28 tKElV WINE SKINS 

that which is found in all trees ; in the concept 
language is found that which exists in every 
language ; the idea of a state is found in every 
state ; and the idea of society is a reality in every 
actual society. It is foolish, then, to speak of 
the idea of society as an empty abstraction ; there 
is no association of which it is not a reality. 
Just as we can study the different existing 
languages and yet have besides a science of 
language which gives what is common to all 
languages, so we can study the separate existing 
societies, such as the state and the church, and 
form a science of political and ecclesiastical in- 
stitutions, while at the same time we can form 
besides these the science of society which deals 
with what all specific societies have in common. 
Botany as a general science treats of the princi- 
ples of all plants ; zoology discusses what is 
common to all animals. Besides this general 
botany and zoology there may, however, be a 
special botany and zoology of New Zealand or 
Switzerland. Men can specialize on the church 
or state ; but that does not take the place of the 
science of society which makes what is common 
to all societies its subject-matter. From the 
actually existing societies we learn what society 
is, just as from a million flowers the extract is 
drawn in order to get their common essence. 
When once the science of society is attained it 
will be found exceedingly rich and practically 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 29 

valuable, because it gives us the essence of all 
association. Sociology, of course, does not end 
its inquiries after attaining the mere idea of 
society ; it also aims to learn how this idea is 
realized in the most significant of the actual soci- 
eties. The true sociologist does not forget that 
his specialty is of supreme importance bacause it 
penetrates and interprets the social actuality. 

III. The Scope of Sociology . 

The scope of sociology limits the aim severely 
to the interpretation of society, and leaves all 
other themes to their specialties. It includes all 
that is socially significant, typical, and character- 
istic ; but because intent on what is essential, it 
does not lose itself in unmeaning details and end- 
less repetitions. Newton need not observe every 
apple that falls in order to discover the law of 
gravitation ; the fall of a single apple involves 
and reveals the law. 

Sociology is not the only social science. Social 
psychology, social ethics, ethnology, politics, 
economics, history, treat of society likewise. 
The question has been much debated whether 
one or all of these could not take the place 
claimed for sociology. Scholars who come to 
sociological studies from economics and politics 
have tried to absorb sociology in their specialty 
and make it essentially economics or politics. 
But does any one of the studies named above 
make society as a totality its subject-matter of 



30 tKElV WINE SKINS 

investigation ? These various disciplines take 
certain phases of society and specialize on them, 
while sociology concentrates the attention on 
society itself. Sociology is the science of society, 
while in every other case we have a social science, 
or a science of some social phase. 

While on the one hand no limited social science 
can take the place of the general science of 
society, on the other, sociology does not propose 
to take the place of economics, politics, history, 
and the like. Just as the science of language 
must limit itself to what is common to all lan- 
guages and cannot make a specialty of Sanskrit, 
Greek, Latin, or French, but leaves these to 
other specialists ; so sociology, treating of what 
pertains to all society, cannot specialize on eco- 
nomics or politics, but leaves these as specialties 
to economists and politicians. The economist 
sees political economy in the industries; the 
sociologist beholds society in them. The one 
seeks economic laws and the other seeks social 
laws. 

Sociology thus has a distinct sphere which it 
shares with no other study. It is not social psy- 
chology or ethics or history ; it is not economics 
or politics ; but it learns from all. As the gen- 
eral science it can determine their relation to each 
other, which no special science can do. Between 
the general and the special sciences a relation of 
mutualism, of cooperation, prevails. 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 31 

It has already been stated that with society as 
its subject-matter sociology cannot turn aside to 
investigate the ultimate metaphysical problems. 
Interminable confusion has prevailed because 
sociology, instead of confining its attention to 
society and drawing its scientific data strictly 
from society, was made the receptacle of all 
kinds of abstruse problems of the human mind. 
As a consequence, sociology has been regarded 
by many as too general to have a definite and 
specific object of investigation. Even social 
students have avoided the term because too 
vague and even unmeaning. If made to include 
all that concerns man it evidently makes impossi- 
ble demands on the sociologist. It is for these 
reasons that the scope, the scientific interpreta- 
tion of society, should be severely adhered to. 

Especially has it been feared that sociology 
may undermine ethics and religion. So long as 
it confines itself to its proper sphere this fear is 
groundless. It takes ethics and religion as social 
factors of great importance ; but it does not pro- 
pose to take the place of ethics and theology. 
Specialists in these departments can continue as 
heretofore to solve the great ethical and religious 
problems without danger that sociology will in- 
vade their specialties as a rival. All it does is to 
treat ethics and religion as social forces and to 
determine their place in relation to the other 



32 VKEIV IVINE SKINS 

forces. Sociology will help ethics and theology 
in their search for truth, and they will help 
sociology in the same search. 

Comte emphasized prevision as one of the aims 
of sociology. He believed it possible to discover 
the laws of the social processes and by means of 
them determine the future movements of society. 
Even in natural science, however, astronomy 
excepted, scientific prevision is limited. We may 
know how forces work without being able to 
tell when, how, in what combinations, and sub- 
ject to what conditions, they will appear. Human 
society is so complex and involves so many 
factors beyond our control, that it is impossible to 
predict the events of a single day. Even the 
best economic expert knows how hazardous 
the attempt to foretell the movements of the 
stock market from hour to hour. At the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century no one could have 
told its course, its events, and its final achieve- 
ments. The appearance of a single personality, 
like Napoleon or Bismarck, may upset all calcula- 
tions. Human society teems with inestimable 
qualitative and quantitative factors. What men 
will appear, what social forces they will exert, 
what cooperation and antagonism will prevail, 
how nature and circumstances will affect human 
action, all are beyond the power of prevision. A 
single life abounds in mystery ; how much more, 
then, the life of an organization and the world. 



THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 33 

But while scientific prevision is out of the ques- 
tion, some idea may be formed of the general 
tendency from a study of the forces at work in 
society. 

Even the predictions respecting the ability of 
sociology to interpret society must be tested by 
the results. So far as the study of society has 
led to a consideration of the profounder problems 
the sociologist has learned many reasons for 
modesty. It is safest to make social interpreta- 
tion the aim of sociology without boastful confi- 
dence as to what interpretation is possible. The 
discovery of historical and social laws has been 
proclaimed repeatedly, when later researches 
showed that the supposed laws were nothing but 
rules, the limit of whose application was doubtful. 
Confidence has in some instances yielded to 
scepticism, and now it is not unusual to hear the 
possibility of discovering social laws questioned. 
The actual establishment of the social science is 
the only way of proving how far society will 
submit to scientific treatment. If eventually it is 
discovered that there are subtle, mysterious, and 
inestimable factors which cannot be treated scien- 
tifically, it is a demand of science itself that this 
fact be frankly admitted. Every science is 
limited ; every interpretation leaves an unin- 
terpreted and, so far as we can see, an unin- 
terpretable residuum. Theory enters where 
demonstration fails ; but theory must be taken 



34 ${EIV WINE SKINS 

for what it is worth, namely, as theory. Often 
what is highest and most deeply concerns human 
interest lies beyond the province of science, 
such as spirit, personality, and certain facts 
pertaining to ethics and religion. An idea may 
be true and valuable even if its correlations and 
its exact place in a scientific system cannot be 
determined. 

In order to accomplish its aim, the interpreta- 
tion of society, sociology is divided into three 
parts : 

I . The Nature of Society. 

II. The Evolution of Society. 

III. Sociological Ethics. 

The first seeks to discover the essence of 
society or its constituent elements ; the second 
deals with the transformations it undergoes in 
the process of development ; the third, based on 
the inherent nature of society and its evolution, 
considers what society ought to be. In the last 
no less than in the other two divisions the aim is 
scientific. Sociological ethics discusses principles 
and leaves their application to the practical social 
disciplines. The first division aims to find what 
always must be in order that society may be ; 
the second deals with what society has been in 
the past and has become through its evolutionary 
processes ; the third, treating of what ought to 
be, involves the progress of society in order to 
realize what its idea requires. 



II 

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 

BY 

REV. J. H. W. STUCKENBERG, D. D., LL. D. 

Editor and Author 
Cambridge, Mass. 



The Nature of Society 



Words with a deep and broad meaning usually 
contain both known and unknown quantities. 
To what is known a plus must be added, and the 
problem is the discovery of the value of the un- 
known x. Society is such a word ; it is used in 
common conversation without any conception of 
its treasures of thought. Sociology aims to make 
the unknown quantities known. 

Heretofore it has been one of the most serious 
difficulties in sociological inquiries that social 
problems have too often been discussed without 
realizing that the nature of society is the first 
problem that requires solution. Many works on 
sociology fail in that they give no definite idea of 
what society is. Some writers seem to think it 
too evident to require explanation, while others 
treat it as too complex for full interpretation. 
We must have society before we can do anything 
with it, and one of the greatest needs in social 
study now is a comprehensive and exhaustive 
view of the nature of society. 

The etymology of the word leads us to socius, 
companion, one who shares or partakes of some- 
thing with another. The fundamental idea in 
the corresponding Greek Koinonia and German 



38 V^E W WINE SKINS 

Gesellschaft is that of association. The members 
of society are associates ; some tie unites them, 
a solidarity of views and interests, or the same 
purpose and a common sphere of action. The 
genesis of society from individuals, or what takes 
place when persons leave their isolation and 
enter into association, must now be investigated. 

Society is frequently called an aggregation of 
individuals ; but this fails to seize what is most 
essential, namely, the fact of association. A 
hundred men gathered to view a conflagration, 
but without any inner bond of union, may be 
called an aggregation, a congregation, an assem- 
blage, but not an association or society. A sum 
of individuals in the same place and merely ex- 
ternally related gives no idea of sociality. 

A mere aggregation of individuals applies better 
to what are called animal societies than to human 
association. Thus animal society is used for 
herds of cattle, schools of fishes, and birds mi- 
grating together. A closer analogy to human 
society is found in hives of bees and communities 
of ants. But even in these analogy must not be 
taken for identity. 

Place, physical contact, external relations 
never constitute human society, but may be im- 
portant conditions for its creation. That men 
associate always involves some kind of mental 
influence on each other. Society involves a giv- 
ing and taking, not physical, but mental ; a 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 39 

communication of thought or feeling or volition. 
Whatever physical basis society may have, its 
essence is always psychical. No relation of men, 
then, involves association unless they have some 
mental content in common. 

This can be illustrated by showing the differ- 
ence between the family as a biological product 
and a society. This difference is the more im- 
portant because biological and sociological pro- 
cesses are so often confounded. 

When a man emigrates from England to Aus- 
tralia or the United States and never again in 
any way associates with his family, he is not 
biologically severed from his kin. Nothing can 
sever the consanguine tie fixed by nature. But 
he and the family to which he belongs have 
ceased to constitute a society. When that 
strange being, Caspar Hauser, was found in 
Nuremberg every effort to find his family was a 
failure. Socially he was never connected with 
it, but its biological unity continued. 

Any mental factor that individuals can share 
with each other may be made the basis of asso- 
ciation ; but in formal social organizations it is 
usually unity of purpose which constitutes the 
combination. Sharing in some degree the same 
thought and feeling, they concentrate these in 
some aim for the attainment of which they unite. 
Such an organization means cooperation. Hence 
the will has been emphasized as the chief factor 
in social organization. 



40 V^EJV WINE SKINS 

In this emphasis on the psychological element 
sociologists are in general agreed. Society does 
not exist unless there is some kind of mental 
intercommunication, some partnership in mental 
content, or a degree of mental solidarity. It has 
been claimed that there must be a measure of 
permanence in the relation between individuals in 
order to constitute a society. We indeed do not 
speak of men as forming an association if they 
meet casually ; at the same time it must be re- 
membered that men who on a train or otherwise 
exchange views and impress each other are sub- 
ject to the very process of giving and taking 
which is the essence of all association. 

In formal organizations, such as the church, the 
state, combinations of capitalists or laborers, 
society appears in a definite form and with the 
most distinct outlines. A specific purpose as the 
nucleus gives precision as well as unity to the 
society. But a sociology which confines its inves- 
tigations to formal organization would miss impor- 
tant social factors. Nor can we exhaust the 
subject by a discussion of social institutions. 
Many of the mental processes which take place 
in society cannot be classified under the head of 
what is established or instituted or formally 
organized. 

An evening gathering or company is called 
society. Social and associative factors exist, 
though there is no formal organization. So there 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 41 

are social groups and communities which can 
justly be called societies though not formally 
organized. It is the mental interchange or 
subjection to the same mental conditions and 
influence which distinguishes them from mere 
aggregations. 

Still more evident is it that society is not 
limited to formal organizations when we inquire 
into what is meant by social products and how 
they arise. We call language a social product; 
likewise traditions, customs, maxims, proverbs ; 
in fact, all that is included in folk-lore. But are 
these produced by organizations? In their pro- 
duction all have a share who influence each other 
mentally. An individual or organization may take 
a prominent part in shaping a language; but in 
reality it is the product of society as inclusive of 
all who have helped to mold the language and 
who are molded by it. That great social inherit- 
ance into which each one is born is a growth 
through many ages to which myriads of persons 
in all kinds of psychical relations have con- 
tributed. However important formal organiza- 
tions may be, they are but a part, not the whole, 
of society. 

Society, then, embraces all groupings of men 
between whom mental combinations and inter- 
actions take place. Its essence is not organiza- 
tion, but this mental interaction. Between two 
friends this mental reciprocity and mutuality may 



42 tHElV WINE SKINS 

be the most intimate, and they can form society 
of the deepest and truest kind, all formal organi- 
zation being out of the question. Indeed, free 
mental spontaneity furnishes some of the best 
illustrations of sociality. What is to be fixed 
upon as fundamental and most essential is that 
human society involves psychical action and 
reaction. 

The preceding lecture has made it clear that 
social consciousness is not the measure of the 
social reality. Men are members of society who 
have no idea what this relation and its responsi- 
bilities mean. We study society for the very 
purpose of making conscious the unconscious 
social bonds and processes. There is a society of 
nations and there is an associated humanity ; but 
who has fully grasped the meaning of these state- 
ments? Society depends on actual psychological 
relation between men, no matter whether it is 
conscious or unconscious. Recent investigations 
have made it evident that much which is deepest 
in society as well as the personality is but feebly 
if at all apprehended. 

I now come to the most radical error respecting 
the nature of society. So universally is society 
regarded as composed of individuals, and so self- 
evident is this thought to be, that no investigation 
of the matter is deemed necessary. The diction- 
aries make it consist of a body of men, a union 
of persons ; and without qualification individuals 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 43 

are said to belong to a society. In view of this 
general concensus it looks like defying common 
sense to deny that individuals literally compose 
society or are its constituent factors. Yet so long 
as this notion prevails society cannot be under- 
stood. It cannot exist without individuals, and all 
its factors emanate from them ; nevertheless it is 
not a union of individuals, but consists of contri- 
butions made by them. 

An individual consists of body and soul ; do 
both belong to a philosophical society? Even if 
we separate the mind as the essence of the indi- 
vidual, can it be said to belong to any society? 
A man is reported to belong to twenty different 
societies ; but if he really belongs to one he can 
no more belong to the other nineteen than a dollar 
can belong to twenty separate individuals. 

The matter can easily be tested. Is a church 
composed of individuals? Has it their minds, 
their hearts, their wills, their means? There are 
churches with millionaires in them which never- 
theless are burdened with debts and have no 
reputation for liberality. A church with fifty 
business men who manage their personal affairs 
admirably may fail to establish a reputation for 
business ability and integrity. The fact is that a 
church has of the mind of the members, of their 
ability and means, only what they give to it. 
Much of what they are and possess is devoted to 
other causes. No church absorbs or wholly 



44 ViEW WINE SKINS 

exploits its members and is truly composed of 
them. Now a church gets more of them, then 
less, but it never gets more than a portion of 
them, and usually the fraction is small. In fact, 
if they were nothing but church members their 
humanity wquld be abnormally limited. 

That individuals do not compose society is 
capable of mathematical demonstration. It is an 
axiom that two things which equal the same thing 
are equal to each other. Let twenty men be 
supposed to constitute a scientific association and 
then form a whist club. The whist club and sci- 
entific association equal the same twenty men, 
therefore the scientific association is a whist club ! 
We need but probe the matter to the bottom to 
see the absurdity of making individuals the social 
constituents, and it seems incredible that such a 
view could ever prevail. 

It is no play on words or unmeaning subtlety 
which is here considered. No less than the foun- 
dation and whole superstructure of sociology are 
involved. The false theory combated has been 
fruitful of serious perversions. An extreme so- 
cialism has drawn the legitimate inference, 
namely, that, since the individual belongs to 
society, it can do as it pleases with him. Society 
simply exercises the rights of proprietor, and the 
rights of the individual against society are denied. 
There can be a social despotism which is as des- 
picable as the worst form of individual tyranny. 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 45 

An extreme, individualism is thus opposed by an 
equally extreme socialism, the one minimizing 
society, the other the individual. The dignity of 
the personality is ignored, and it is claimed that 
there is a social but no individual ethics. The 
conclusions thus drawn are the inevitable logic of 
the doctrine that the individual belongs to society. 

In opposition to this error I need but appeal to 
your deepest convictions. There are private 
affairs which do not belong to society, and which 
are not subject to social control. In his thoughts, 
beliefs, and choices a man is free. He may be per- 
suaded, but cannot be coerced. There is some- 
thing so peculiarly, so absolutely individual, that 
it cannot be shared. There is within the per- 
sonality a holy of holies which he only, the high 
priest, can enter. The individual has as sacred 
precincts as society ; and some things no true man 
will abandon at the behest of others, though he 
must stand alone or even die for them. His con- 
science ceases to be conscience so soon as he 
ceases to be its keeper. 

We have a right to claim that this modern idea 
of the dignity and sanctity of the personality is 
the true idea. Unmistakably, then, there is in 
the individual something which does not belong to 
society, that which makes him more than a thing 
and constitutes him a person. 

The error arises because we place a full de- 
pendence on our senses and fail to exercise our 



46 V^EIV WME SKINS 

reason. We see people together and imagine that 
therefore we have society ; but so soon as we 
think through the subject it becomes self-evident 
that society is not made by the coming together 
of individuals, and is not composed of individuals. 
Society is not seen, but thought. 

A society always consists of what individuals 
give ; it is not composed of themselves, but of 
what they contribute of themselves. Let us call 
that which they give social force. Society, then, 
consists of the social forces emanating from indi- 
viduals, and it is a concentration or union of these 
social forces. This is its soul ; all that is external 
and visible is but its body. 

In the church as a society we have a concen- 
tration of the religious force of the members. Not 
that the church gets the whole of this force ; some 
of it may be given to one of the many voluntary 
religious associations, while what is deepest in the 
personality never finds social expression. Some 
have actually claimed that there is more religion 
outside than inside of the churches. Nor is the 
religious force found in absolute isolation in the 
church. With it are connected other forces, such 
as the economic, esthetic, and political. An art 
club is a concentration of esthetic forces ; an in- 
dustrial society is a union of economic forces. 
Thus the individual, instead of belonging literally 
to an association, gives to one a contribution of 
his religious force, to another of his esthetic, to 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 47 

another of his political, while much of the force 
in him is private and never given to any society. 
The individual, therefore, has both private and 
social forces, and the social ones are given to the 
various societies to which, in common parlance, 
he is said to belong. 

Now we have the key for the interpretation of 
society. The task becomes hopeless if in every 
instance the individuals must be considered. 
What shall we do in that case with the long pre- 
historic era in which we have not even the names 
of the actors? But from the remains discovered 
we have an idea of the forces then at work. 
Even in historic times there are long eras in which 
but few persons are known ; but the forces are to 
some extent known, and from them the history 
can be constructed. History deals with forces, 
and with persons only so far as they exert them, 
while biography is more concerned about the 
personality. 

Every science deals with forces as the essence, 
and in all cases it seeks to get from objects to the 
energies inherent in them. In economics the laws 
of the forces at work are the same whatever per- 
sons may exert them. The same is true of poli- 
tics and of ethics. History is not concerned with 
the energy inherent in Bismarck, but with the 
political power he exerted. By concentrating the 
attention on the social forces, sociology simply 
takes its place with economics, politics, ethics, 
and the other sciences. 



48 tKEJV fVINE SKINS 

We now see the value of the statement often 
made that society is as the aggregate of its units, 
these units being individuals. If a hundred men 
meet to form some society, can you tell what its 
character will be unless you know their purpose? 
A score of associations may be possible. Some- 
times a person gives less of himself to a society, 
then more, according to inclination and circum- 
stances. In a crisis a society may absorb twice 
as much of its members as ordinarily. Thus at 
different times persons belong to a society in 
different senses ; and it is impossible to determine 
from the sum of the individuals what the char- 
acter of the society they form will be. What 
men are as individuals gives no clue as to what 
they will be when associated, except in the most 
general way. It depends on the stimuli which 
come from others, and how the man responds to 
them. The needle which when free points to the 
north pole may be changed by a neighboring 
magnet. 

Turn, now, from the unmeaning statement that 
society is a sum of persons to what it really is, 
namely, a concentration of the social forces of 
persons, and the subject becomes clear. Tell me 
the kind and degree of forces concentrated in an 
association, and I will explain its character. Make 
the social forces the units of society ; then it is 
always true that society is as its units. I know 
what kind of an association men will form if I 






THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 49 

know what forces they will unite — economic, 
political, religious, esthetic ; otherwise I can have 
no idea which of the many possible ones will be 
organized. 

It will at once be seen how complete a revolu- 
tion is effected in the study of society by appre- 
hending it as composed of the forces which 
persons exert, instead of the persons themselves. 
Society always consists of the interaction of the 
social forces of individuals. When we say that 
persons combine we mean that they unite their 
forces for some end. Persons are by no means 
eliminated ; all the social forces emanate from 
them. They are, however, put in the right place. 
As rays of light can be concentrated in a focus, 
so can the forces of persons be concentrated. 
The focus where these forces meet, interact, 
cooperate, or antagonize each other, is society. 

Difficult as this view of society at first appears, 
reflection will make it familiar and its truth cer- 
tain. We can still use the old terms, and say that 
individuals belong to and constitute society, but it 
must be with the new meaning. The true idea 
once fully grasped, we become astonished that we 
could ever believe society actually composed of 
individuals. 

Some important inferences follow from the 
above : 

Society is not formed by individuals as trees 
constitute a forest, by means of collecting them 



50 V^EJV WINE SKINS 

in the same place. It is not formed of them as 
hydrogen and oxygen form water, being so 
absorbed that aside from the association nothing is 
left of them. We must also reject the figure of 
Herbert Spencer, that society is a building of 
which the members are the various stones so 
cemented together as to form a unity. A stone 
cannot at the same time be walled into twenty 
buildings, but a person can belong to scores of 
societies. 

Neither is society an organism, literally, of 
persons — a common view that teems with errors. 
The individual is more than an organ of society. 
To be an organ of society in certain communities 
means to be an organ of the devil. It is refresh- 
ing, at a time when the personality is so often 
degraded, to find an ethical writer who declares 
that the individual is "the organ of God." He 
may choose to be the organ of his own ideals 
rather than of a debased community. 

Society is, however, an organism of the social 
energies, such a union of the social forces that 
they interact, influence each other. This union 
may be in the main cooperative, but antagonistic 
elements are not lacking. As we have seen, 
these social forces are mental, consisting of 
thoughts, impulses, purposes which exist in per- 
sons, but become social energies by being com- 
municated from one to another. 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 51 

Each specific society is a unit and has an indi- 
viduality of its own according to the peculiarity 
of the forces it contains. A thousand labor organ- 
izations are alike in their general aim, yet each 
has distinctive features, because no two have the 
same energies combined in the same way. 

There are simple social units and there are 
compound units or units composed of other units. 
A particular church is a simple unit; a denomi- 
nation is a compound unit composed of the 
various churches. So the United States is a unit 
of units, and a state is a unit composed of town- 
ships, counties, judicial, legislative, and congres- 
sional districts. 

Many societies coexist which are not com- 
pounded ; they are not dependent on each other, 
yet each may be affected by the course of the 
other. All the societies in a free state cannot be 
regarded as 'an integral part of the state. A 
church within the external bounds of the state 
and protected by it may yet be free to manage its 
own affairs. There are numerous other non- 
political associations which sustain the same 
relation to municipalities and nations. Some 
churches and scientific societies extend beyond a 
nation. Socialism, for instance, has formed inter- 
national alliances. States themselves are leagued 
together and form a society of nations. In mod- 
ern times the relations entered into by the different 
peoples, in one way and another, extend around 



52 tKEW WINE SKINS 

the globe., and make humanity itself a society in 
the largest sense. This affords some idea of the 
vastness of the social relations and the complexity 
involved in society. Each society is a concen- 
tration of social forces, and it, in turn, becomes a 
social force ; societies which are compounded or 
united are a combination of forces ; societies not 
compounded, but coexistent, constantly influence 
one another. This great and intricate tissue of 
forces, each fiber acting on others and acted on by 
them, is the object of our investigation. Every 
such force, every society, is not to be viewed 
merely as it now exists, but as having a past 
which has made it, and a future whither it tends. 

The Individual and Society. 

The nature of society will stand out in bolder 
relief if the relation of the individual to it is more 
fully explained. A social thinker has declared 
the relation of the individual to society the most 
difficult problem of the nineteenth century. Its 
solution is of practical as well as of theoretical 
value. This solution will be materially aided by 
a careful discrimination between the private and 
the social forces. 

A person can be viewed as so much force, part 
of which is exerted solely for self, unknown even 
to others, while the rest goes out to others and 
exerts a social influence. All the force of an 
individual is personal ; but only that part is social 
which affects his fellow-men. A thought which 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 53 

remains in the mind of the thinker and an emo- 
tion which finds its grave in the heart are not 
social ; but they become so as soon as expressed 
to other persons. Kepler spoke of the many 
theories pursued by a scientist of which the 
world has no conception ; Newton is said to have 
required imagination as much as Shakespeare. 
But what do others learn of theories finally aban- 
doned by the investigator, and of the imagination 
which leads to no results? Every life, especially 
that of the thinker, is vastly richer than the 
world can conceive. In many instances but a 
small fraction of the personal force becomes social. 
An idea or invention which dies with its posses- 
sor is private but not public property. A Roger 
Bacon is too far in advance of his age to be 
understood by it; that which he alone has and 
cannot share with others isolates him and makes 
him solitary. Since only that which is shared is 
social, we have the strange fact that a man may 
have wealth of intellect which the society to 
which he belongs does not possess. A strong 
individuality is always more than social concensus 
and social conformity. Much that the prophet 
hears and sees on his tower may be incommuni- 
cable to those not prophets ; therefore it cannot 
become social. 

There is a twofold evolution of society: that 
which is commonly meant by social evolution, 
namely, the development of existing society ; the 



54 WEIV WME SKINS 

other is that which is generally overlooked, the 
evolution of society itself from individuals. The 
latter needs emphasis now on account of its 
importance and its neglect. So long as Crusoe 
and Friday remain apart no genesis of society 
takes place. But so soon as they meet, enter 
into communication, think, feel, plan, work to- 
gether, society exists. The process is always the 
same whether two or millions are concerned. 

A number of terms taken from the individual 
and applied to society require explanation. With 
the same thoughtlessness that we speak of indi- 
viduals as belonging to society we speak of a 
social mind, social consciousness, social con- 
science, social thought, feeling, will. Not one 
of these really exists ; all are mere figures of 
speech. Congress has no mind; its resolutions, 
discussions, votes, actions, are always those of 
individuals. Where is the brain or mind of 
seventy millions of people to think and act for 
them? The piety of a church is nothing but the 
piety of the members. There is no conscious- 
ness of an audience except that found in each 
hearer. Public opinion is but a collective term 
for the opinions of the individuals who constitute 
the public or the majority of them. When we 
speak of thought or feeling otherwise than as 
found in individual minds we deal with abstrac- 
tions or use figurative language. A philosophical 
society cannot think, but its members think. 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 55 

This removal of myths must not, however, 
mislead us to suppose that individuals are the 
only reality and that society is nothing. Men 
who meet to mingle their thoughts are themselves 
made different from what they would have been 
if they had remained alone. Of course nothing 
can be in society which has not its origin in some 
individual mind ; but if we want to be assured of 
the reality of social action, look at the state as it 
exerts its enormous power, or at an army as it 
fights a battle. In such cases we do not merely 
consider the mental deliberations or resolutions 
which are the true social forces, but also the 
material means they use to accomplish their pur- 
poses. The products of society are so different 
from those of isolated individuals, and they are 
so numerous, that they testify unmistakably to 
the reality of society. 

We have also the strange phenomenon that an 
association may decide what is contrary to the 
preference of each member. The decision is 
reached for the sake of expediency or out of 
deference of the members for each other. Indi- 
vidual members of Congress did not want the 
Missouri Compromise ; it was adopted as the 
mean of concession on the part of the conflicting 
parties respecting the slavery question. 

Some products are so distinctively social that 
they could never have been created by isolated 
individuals. Language is but one of many illus- 



56 tKElV WINE SKINS 

trations, though the most striking. With nothing 
but isolated human beings, history with all its 
treasures would of course be impossible. 

As individualism and socialism place a different 
emphasis on the individual and society, so we 
find the same contrast in the estimate of history. 
An interesting conflict has for some time been 
waged with respect to the place of the individual 
and society in historic processes. Frequently the 
great man theory has prevailed, that history has 
been made by men of eminent ability and 
exalted position; and the old histories deal 
chiefly with kings, statesmen, generals, priests, 
and scholars. The people were not considered 
of much account, and it is true that they have 
often been mere clay in the hands of their 
leaders. But leaders were nothing without those 
that followed; and whoever may have been 
the generals, there could be no army without 
soldiers. Thus rulers and the people must 
always have cooperated in great historic move- 
ments. The leader is, in fact, but a part of the 
society the glory of whose deeds his personality 
absorbs. One need but read Carlyle's " Heroes 
and Hero-Worship " to learn how the great man 
theory has dominated history. It has too gen- 
erally been overlooked that a man becomes great 
in history because, whatever his superiority, 
there were those who were capable of being led 
and of responding to his initiative. 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 57 

Formerly the individualistic view was more 
prevalent. The masses were treated with con- 
tempt. To Nero is attributed the saying that 
" kings are gods, the people cattle "; and it was 
eminently characteristic. As late as 1682 the 
French clergy enunciated this doctrine: "The 
kings are not only ordained of God, but are 
themselves gods." Louis XIV wrote to the 
Dauphin: "There are certain duties of royalty 
in which we, so to say, being representatives of 
God, seem to share his knowledge as well as his 
authority." For Napoleon, who spoke to Metter- 
nich with indifference about sacrificing a million 
lives in battle, it was natural to glorify individual 
might. He said : " An army of rabbits led by a 
lion is better than an army of lions commanded 
by a rabbit," not considering that if ever an 
army of lions appears it will devour rather than 
follow a rabbit. This contempt of the people has 
not yet vanished altogether from Europe. 

The social spirit which has come at times goes 
to the other extreme. It makes society dominant 
in history at the expense of individuals. It is 
true that a man is himself dependent on his social 
heredity and environment; but how he uses 
these is his own work. He can do nothing that 
has lasting value without society. What he does 
only for himself dies with him ; what he does for 
society enters its fibre, lasts while it does, and 
thus ensures his work an earthly immortality. 



58 V^EW PVINE SKINS 

To separate the individual from his social sur- 
rounding is a false abstraction. He gives and 
takes ; he is made in part by society, society in 
part by him. The greatest personal force must 
meet with receptivity in order to be effective. 
But for all social action the initiative must come 
from some individual. Not that it is wholly an 
original creation, for he is subject to social in- 
fluence. 

As the people were formerly ignored, then 
recently exalted as if not subject to individual 
initiative, so now we behold a reaction in favor 
of the power of the individual. In a socialistic 
era we behold Kierkegaard of Denmark, Ibsen 
of Norway, and Nietzsche of Germany arise 
as the apostles of individualism. They want an 
aristocracy of the freedom and might of the per- 
sonality. Especially the last demands with a 
kind of frenzy that the individual have the right 
to express himself fully, "to live himself out." 

It seems incredible that any one should ques- 
tion the historic influence of great personalities. 
Without its prophets, reformers, thinkers, and 
generals, history could not have been the same. 
Why did seven cities claim to be the birthplace 
of Homer if society is everything and the indi- 
vidual nothing? 

The conflict between the claims of the individ- 
ual and society, individualism and socialism, will 
last until it is seen that each is wrong if it claims 



THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 59 

everything. Their relation is that of reciprocity. 
Society is nothing without individuals; it has no 
forces but those which come from them. But as 
the individual gives to others so he receives from 
them. The person who is not a mere echo of 
society but makes original and effective contribu- 
tions is historic. Ranke says that the great man 
is not wholly dependent on his age nor indepen- 
dent ; but he takes its ideas, makes them his 
own, develops them in his own way, and then 
gives them back to his generation. He is recep- 
tive, but also original, creative. But of what his- 
toric significance is his creation unless there are 
those who can receive and transmit it? 



Ill 

THE SOCIAL FORCES 

BY 

REV. J. H. W. STUCKENBERG, D.D. LL.D. 

Editor and Author 
Cambridge, Mass. 



The Social Forces 



We have called that which passes from mind 
to mind and thus becomes the possession of a 
number of individuals social force. It is the 
social essence or that which constitutes the sub- 
stance of society. Let us designate it, figura- 
tively, of course, the mind of society. This mind 
has the same social function which the mind has 
in the case of a person ; it is the directive, the 
controlling power. But we can also speak of the 
body of society. This includes all the visible 
agencies and physical properties used by the 
social mind. Society must have means of reveal- 
ing itself and putting its purposes into action. 
Societies, governments, for instance, make use of 
individuals to accomplish their aims ; they estab- 
lish various institutions in which their thoughts 
are embodied and their feelings revealed. We 
can get at the social mind only through the ex- 
ternal revelations it makes of itself. To study 
the mind of a community means to study its 
manifold manifestations, just as an individual 
must be judged by his words and deeds. No 
more in the case of society than of a man can 
we separate the mind from the body ; but how- 
ever intimately the two are connected, it is psy- 



64 WEIV WINE SKINS 

chology, not physiology, which gives us the 
essential characteristics of the individual and of 
society. This whole subject of the social body, 
a vast and important realm, is here suggested for 
the sake of clearness ; we cannot elaborate it. 

It has been asserted that an army is not a so- 
ciety ; it is a force used by a people to protect 
and maintain their interests. Men and munitions 
of war and all that belongs to military operations 
are included, and so far it may be classed under 
the agencies used by the social mind for its pur- 
poses, just as the post-office department with its 
buildings, or the police force. But, on the other 
hand, an army may have the same thought, feel- 
ing, and aim, these being the conditions for its 
unity of action. So far as it has the same mind 
it is a society. What a people thinks and feels 
and purposes in respect to army operations is as 
truly a social force in the sense indicated in the 
preceding lecture, as the religious or aesthetic sen- 
timents. 

The social forces of humanity, those mental 
factors which constantly pass between men and 
subject organizations, groups, and communities to 
the same sentiments and purposes, constitute the 
distinctive features of human association. In 
proportion as human psychology differs from that 
of the rest of the animal creation does human 
society differ from that of animals. The recent 
creation and development of psycho-physics or 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 65 

physiological psychology has shown how inter- 
dependent mind and body are on each other, the 
health and vigor of one affecting that of the 
other also. So through its body society receives 
influences, and through its body it operates. The 
influence of physical conditions on the social 
forces is great, sometimes dominant. Especially 
in primitive times, when the mind was not yet 
developed, were the character and the cause of 
peoples determined by soil and climate, vale and 
mountain, flora and fauna. A people living in- 
land could not be the same as one on the sea. 
The Atlantic coast of Africa could not promote 
the intercourse of peoples like the Mediterranean 
with its many harbors. Greece was admirably 
situated for intercourse with other peoples ; its 
geographical position made it accessible to Africa, 
Asia, and the European peoples. One need but 
study the relation of physical to social conditions 
to learn why the early civilizations clustered 
around or near the Mediterranean, along the rivers 
Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris, and those of India 
and China. Excessive heat enervates ; it may 
have been favorable for the beginning of the 
human race, because it furnished an abundance 
of food ; but where nature does all for man his 
energies are not developed and he stagnates. On 
the other hand, in the Arctic regions, where all 
the time and energy are required to secure a 
livelihood, no opportunity is given for higher 



66 V{EW WINE SKINS 

culture. For civilization the temperate zone, re- 
quiring human effort but responding favorably to 
that effort, affords the most advantageous con- 
ditions. 

Those persons who are spiritualistic and ideal- 
istic are inclined to minimize the influence of the 
physical forces on society, while those absorbed 
by natural science to the neglect of the human 
sciences are tempted to exaggerate them. As 
mind advances from the state of the savage to 
that of culture it continually grows in the ascend- 
ancy over nature until it completely subdues its 
laws and makes them minister to human ends. 
Often a cultured people rises above its natural 
conditions. Ireland, isolated and in an inhos- 
pitable clime, had a precious literature in the 
Middle Ages when the northern continental 
peoples, far more favorably situated, were en- 
veloped in darkness. The same soil, climate, 
and sea where the Greeks developed philosophy 
and science and gave the world ideals of art, 
now belong to the Turk. Prussia is amongst the 
newest of German states, having risen on the 
ruins of the Thirty Years' War. Its original ter- 
ritory was neither favored by soil nor climate. 
But the people and rulers have unfolded marvel- 
ous energy, and now Prussia stands at the head 
of the German Empire, and the little electorate 
has become one of the leading states of the 
world. 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 67 

Race undoubtedly has an influence on the social 
forces ; but, unfortunately, we have no way of 
definitely estimating it. There is no agreement 
as to what is meant by race, how it is formed, 
what its exact characteristics are, and what effect 
it produces. How and when the races originated 
cannot be determined. Indeed, there is no con- 
sensus even as to the number of races, some 
taking three, others five, and in one case over 
sixty being enumerated. The whole subject is 
complicated by the fact that it is admitted that no 
race is found in a pure state. The various races 
have mingled and thus produced new types. As 
a consequence we can trace what are regarded as 
general racial characteristics, but can hardly 
claim to go further. The Semitic and Aryan 
peoples have attained the most advanced civiliza- 
tion. In many respects, however, the Mongolians 
surpassed them thousands of years ago, and in 
some departments of economics they may yet 
rival the most advanced peoples. It certainly 
looks as if during the twentieth century Asia, 
with over one half of the population of the globe, 
will be the centre of interest and development. 

It is especially through heredity that the race 
manifests itself ; but it is impossible to determine 
just what is due to heredity, what to environ- 
ment, some emphasizing one as the more potent, 
some the other. The native endowment is due 
to heredity, that potentiality with which the indi- 



68 diEW WINE SKINS 

vidual starts ; but what shall be made of it 
depends on the family, the natural and social 
environment, and personal effort. The same 
native endowment may be developed in various 
directions under different influences. We can 
see the final results, but who can trace the numer- 
ous and intricate influences to hereditary and 
environmental causes? Both factors must be 
taken into account, and sometimes, no doubt, one 
is more effective, then the other. 

When a hen has been sitting on duck eggs and 
the brood appears, the ducklings, in spite of the 
stepmother and other environment, rush into 
the first pond they find. That is heredity. There 
are at least seven well authenticated accounts of 
children having been carried off and reared by 
wolves in India. When they were recovered 
they were quite wolfish ; they often walked on 
all fours, the sounds they made and their habits, 
the food they preferred, all savored more of the 
wolf than of humanity. Generally even the 
society of the wolves was preferred, and they 
would escape to them from their human habita- 
tions or make attempts to escape. That is the 
influence of environment. 

This must suffice as a hint on the many factors 
to be considered in the study of the social forces. 
Numerous interesting points must here be omitted. 
Among the most important is the question 
whether, as society develops and the social en- 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 69 

vironment increases in power, individuality will 
decrease. The eminent scholar, Dollinger, held 
that Americans are in danger of making a com- 
mon level the standard of excellence to the 
depression of individual peculiarity and origi- 
nality. Where all are politically equal each is 
apt to think himself fit for everything, while 
there is danger that specialization will take one 
out of the common level. Public opinion may 
be as great a despot in a republic as is a tyrant 
on a throne. It is certainly worthy of inquiry, 
how far the ordinary life in the United States, the 
education in the common and higher schools, the 
standard set by the press, by political bossism, 
and the fashions, is calculated to establish a 
monotonous level and suppress individuality. 
Are we intolerant of religious and political pe- 
culiarity? 

On turning now from the conditions which 
affect them to the social forces themselves, we 
see that they are to society what the sap is to 
the tree. If we want to get from the outward 
and superficial manifestations of society to the 
interpreting cause, we shall have to seize them as 
the soul. Social revolutions and evolutions are 
the creation and embodiment of the deep, invisi- 
ble energies of the social mind. Whatever leads 
us to these forces puts us at the heart. Much as 
I had read about anarchism I did not understand 
it until I attended the meetings of anarchists and 



70 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

came in direct contact with the manifestation of 
the anarchic forces. There is much more in 
anarchism than the murders perpetrated by- 
anarchists reveal. Socialism, also, and nihilism 
can be understood only by those who have their 
finger on the pulse and feel the heart-beats. 

If you give me the forces of a social group or 
community or church or state or voluntary or- 
ganization, you hand me the letters which I need 
but combine in order to construct the literature, 
philosophy, and science of the association. 

We have seen that all the social forces are per- 
sonal ; they consist of what the individual gives 
of his mind to others. But all the personal forces 
are not social ; many of them remain private, 
not being communicated to a fellow-man. It is 
important to follow the personal force as it be- 
comes social. Kant teaches the critical philoso- 
phy of which he is the sole possessor, and it 
becomes one of the great powers of the nine- 
teenth century. The uprising of the Germans 
to resist Napoleonic tyranny in the beginning of 
the century has been ascribed largely to the 
moral influence of the Kantian system. A man 
feels more strongly a need or an impulse than 
others ; he makes it known, it becomes conta- 
gious, and missions, eleemosynary institutions, 
Sunday schools, and young peoples' associations 
are established. Thus what is at first a private 
force may become a social one ; the possession of 
the individual is made the property of the public. 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 71 

A man can be estimated as a private and as a 
social personality, the former including all he is 
to himself solely, the latter his influence on 
others. Sometimes self-culture has been at- 
tacked, as if it meant selfishness. It is over- 
looked that a man's whole force, whether private 
or social, depends on his personality. A weak 
man is weak socially ; but a strong man may be 
still weaker by concentrating his energies on 
himself. Great power in society, however, in- 
volves a strong personality. If a man uses his 
energy socially, then the more he has of it and 
the greater his culture the better for society. 

As the person so his forces ; in his influence on 
society he always gives of himself and cannot 
do otherwise. As thus his personality is involved 
in the social forces he exerts, is he not necessarily 
controlled by selfishness or at least by self-inter- 
est? An influential school of moralists teaches 
that self-interest is not only innate, but also una- 
voidably the controlling factor in all influence. 

Selfishness, the effort to make self, particularly 
the lower self, the source and end of everything, 
is always degrading. Egotism is based on the 
falsehood that the egotist is the only worthy 
object and that others must worship the idol as 
he himself does. But self-interest has a large 
sphere of legitimate activity. Attention to his 
proper interests is the condition for a man's ex- 
istence and social action. Since all that is dear- 



72 n{EW WINE SKINS 

est to him depends on it he has a right, a duty, 
in fact, to oppose all that interferes with his true 
interests. This does not imply that there may 
not be other interests to which his own is subordi- 
nate. 

Serious difficulties will be overcome by dis- 
criminating between a man's self-interest and 
what he is interested in. Self-interest centres in 
self, makes the supposed welfare of self the end. 
A man never voluntarily pursues what he is not 
interested in ; but he can be interested in some- 
thing else than self ; he may prize the truth, re- 
ligion, a noble cause, or his country above his 
life. The man who dies for the right because he 
is supremely interested in it cannot be said to be 
controlled by selfishness or by self-interest. Two 
prisoners escaped from a penitentiary in Ger- 
many and safely crossed a stream on the ice. 
The official who pursued them broke through the 
ice and one of the prisoners returned to rescue 
him. Could the act which endangered his free- 
dom, perhaps his life, be ascribed to self-interest? 

The social forces are not merely developmental, 
as seed grows into a tree, a chronological process ; 
they also spread in space, diffusively, not unfold- 
ing something new, but making more general 
what already exists. This diffusive process, apt 
to be overlooked by evolution, includes much that 
is usually put under the head of progress. By 
the development of Christianity men generally 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 73 

understand its spread as a doctrine or system 
from people to people, not an unfolding of its 
seeds and germs into the ear and the full corn in 
the ear. Not a few look with suspicion on the 
notion that there can be a progress of Christi- 
anity in any other sense than spreading its teach- 
ings. Even educational institutions often lay the 
stress on imparting existing information and 
scholarship rather than on a mental development 
and a process of investigation which prepare for 
an advance to a higher stage of intellectual de- 
velopment. The teacher browses, the pupils 
chew the cud. Therefore it has been said : 
11 Teach to think, not what has been thought." 

A survey of human society and its history re- 
veals the fact that imitation has been one of the 
most powerful of factors. Hume emphasized it 
and Tarde has written a book to prove its signifi- 
cance in sociology. Sometimes opinions gain a 
kind of unconscious prevalence, as if by hyp- 
notic suggestion or contagion. Tradition, cus- 
tom, belief, fashion, testify to the prevalence of 
the imitative faculty. But its power is usually 
dominant in proportion to the low degree of men- 
tal development. With reflection, criticism, phil- 
osophy, and science, its influence wanes. Yet 
even in an age called scientific there may be few 
true scientists, while the second and third-rate 
scientists, to say nothing of the unscientific 
masses, are mere imitators in the very depart- 



74 VKEIV WINE SKINS 

ment of science. Imitation is so powerful be- 
cause it works so subtly and unconsciously. 

Viewing now society as a unit composed by the 
interacting of the social forces of individuals, now 
working diffusively, now evolutionally, how can 
we form a clear and comprehensive conception of 
its various processes? Society is a great ferment, 
every force acting as a leaven in connection with 
all the other forces, each of which likewise acts 
as a leavening power. The very multiplicity of 
factors at work arrests the attention at first and 
causes bewilderment, because unity and harmony 
are not discoverable. Whether we consider the 
action and reaction, the cooperation and antago- 
nism, the diversity of processes and variety of 
structures, or the conflicting elements in the con- 
tent of the social mind, there seems to be no 
escape from chaos. Our only hope is in such a 
classification as will reduce to a minimum the 
various causes acting in society. What is needed 
is a social analysis which gives all the forces and 
enables us to apprehend with their aid the end- 
less social processes. It is like an apprehension 
of nature by means of its elements. But the 
classification of the social forces has been found 
exceedingly difficult. 

If we are to undertake the task with any hope 
of success we must first of all find a valid method 
for determining the classification. There is the 
psychological method which asks what are the 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 75 

forces of the individual which become social and 
lead to association or affect society. When Aris- 
totle and others make man a social being and by 
this interpret his social relations, we find the 
statement too general for our purpose. Society is 
always the product of man's nature and his rela- 
tion to his fellow-men ; but what is there in his 
nature that impels him to seek companionship? 
There are needs of his being which only his 
fellow-beings can gratify, or which can best be 
satisfied in conjunction with them. Call it affin- 
ity, sympathy, love, or what you will, a man 
needs his fellows for the completion of his own 
being. Numerous combinations are also formed 
for utilitarian purposes, to secure a livelihood, to 
make a division of labor possible, to ward off foes, 
or to pursue any end which surpasses individual 
strength. 

Another method for discovering the social forces 
may be called historic or inductive. Societies as 
they exist and have appeared in history are ex- 
amined with a view to the discovery of the forces 
concentrated in them. Thus certain forces appear 
in every age and become the occasion of impor- 
tant organizations and of permanent social pro- 
cesses. The careful student cannot miss certain 
human energies which appear everywhere and at 
all times, and it is these rather than what is 
exceptional which we seek. 



76 ${EIV IVJNE SKINS 

We combine the psychological with the historic 
method in determining our classification of the 
social forces. 

The universality of selfishness seems to point 
to it as the dominant factor in the social relations. 
Men often enter associations for selfish ends which 
they hope to attain better by organization than 
alone. The same applies to self-interest; it is 
frequently best promoted by association. Yet 
just because selfishness is so general it cannot 
well be classed as a force distinct from all the 
rest. It is a parasite of all the distinctive social 
forces, so that in economics, politics, religion, and 
art a man can be self-seeking. 

The same applies to altruism, the opposite of 
egotism. It is a kind of general principle affect- 
ing all of a man's relations and the exercise of all 
his forces. Altruism and selfishness are the 
atmosphere in which the social forces of a per- 
sonality live, the light in which all their colors 
appear. . 

From self-seeking springs vanity, found among 
peoples of highest culture as well as among sav- 
ages ; ambition likewise, whose effect has had a 
marked influence on the course of society. The 
love of honor has been a ruling passion with 
many historic characters. 

Some of the forces are compound, being com- 
posed of two or more of the simpler forces. 
Benevolence may spring from altruism or affec- 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 77 

tion in connection with ethics and religion. Sym- 
pathy is but a form of affection. Numerous 
other impulses and forces can be deduced from 
those given in the table below, or can be formed 
by compounding them. 

With this explanation I proceed to give a table 
of the social forces which find their grounds in 
psychology and history, and which have been 
most powerful in determining the relations of men 
one to another and the cause of social history. 
Whether or not all social action can be explained 
by them, they at least interpret the most essential 
phases and structures of society. I also believe 
that under this classification can be placed all the 
social forces. 

The Social Forces. 

{I. Economic. 
Protec- f II. Martial, Militarism, 
tive, \ III. Political. 

Constitutional, f 1 ^ $^™\. 
Physiological, | yL Recreative< 

{VII. ^Esthetic. 

VIII. Ethical. 

IX. Religious. 

X. Intellectual. 

The first three forces are called fundamental, 
because they are necessary for the existence of 
society and for the exercise of the other forces. 
Under the economic force are included all the 
efforts to obtain a livelihood, from the gathering 



78 V{EW WINE SKINS 

of roots, berries, and nuts to the organization of 
the world-market. Men must live in order to 
discharge the functions of life, and for this reason 
this force occupies the first place. 

The second and third forces are protective as 
well as fundamental. Men must protect them- 
selves against wild beasts and against their 
fellow-men in order to establish and perpetuate 
society. But in society men must protect them- 
selves against each other. The martial force has 
existed in some form from the beginning, or as 
soon as different groups of men were brought in 
contact with each other. In the course of time 
this force led to the vast military organizations of 
which such striking examples are seen in our day. 
The political force is regulative, and protective 
because regulative. It fixes the relation of men 
to each other by law, and thus establishes peace 
and order. This force organizes the state and 
government, and uses the military to accomplish 
its ends. Yet we cannot always include the 
martial under the political force, because war is 
much older than the state. The political force for 
some reasons might be put under the cultural 
ones, because it appears long after the primitive 
stage is passed, and involves certain elements of 
culture — a civil state is evidence of civilization. 
It is, however, here put among the fundamental 
forces, because fundamental for society after a 
certain stage of development has been attained. 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 79 

The next group of three forces is constitutional; 
they spring directly from the constitution of men, 
being a direct expression of what is inherent in 
him. As they are rooted so directly in his phys- 
ical system they can also be called physiological, 
though their operation reveals truly psychological 
factors. Because a direct revelation of man's 
nature, needing no culture to express their true 
character, they can also be called elemental. 
These forces are found in all stages of devel- 
opment. 

The appetitive force is that native impulse to 
gratification found in hunger, thirst, and the 
sexual desire. The use of this impulse is evi- 
dent, since on it the life of the individual depends, 
and also the continuance of the race. The liabil- 
ity to abuse consists in the excess caused by 
making an end in itself that which is valuable so 
far as it is but a means to some other end. 

The affectional force includes the affections, 
such as love, friendship, and all that springs from 
the native affinity of man for his own kind. It 
is universal, being found in the savage as well as 
among the enlightened, though in very different 
degrees. 

The recreative force includes the play-element, 
amusement, sports of various kinds. It has not 
heretofore received the prominence which its 
importance demands. It is found in children and 
the aged, among the lowest and highest peoples. 



80 ViEW WINE SKINS 

In many associations it is a dominant force, and 
there are communities in which it seems second 
only to the economic. In the Olympic games it 
became a bond of union between the independent 
Greek states ; and in modern times it is seen in 
club life, in athletic sport, in cards and billiards, 
and in countless entertainments. Travel, sum- 
mer resorts, and even the saloon belong largely to 
this force. 

The cultural forces require culture for their 
manifestation, and it is for that reason I have 
chosen the name. The constitutional ones mani- 
fest themselves without culture, freely, sponta- 
neously, immediately. The cultural forces, on 
the other hand, require some degree of develop- 
ment before their true nature appears. In germ 
they exist in the most primitive stage, so that 
they are a development of what is human and 
not a foreign element grafted on man. But they 
differ from the constitutional forces in that their 
manifestation in the savage stage is embryonic 
and crude, while the appetitive, the affectional, 
and the recreative forces, in however rude a form, 
reveal their true character from the beginning. 
The child exerts the constitutional forces, while 
only after certain stages of development the cul- 
tural ones appear. 

The aesthetic force is the realm of beauty and 
art. In a very rude form it manifests itself 
among the lower peoples in music, dancing, draw- 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 81 

ing, painting, and carving. The spontaneous 
element in art naturally puts it nearest the ele- 
mental forces. Its most powerful manifestations 
have appeared in Greece in ancient times, then in 
Florence and Rome and France. The most popu- 
lar and most highly cultivated art now is music, 
with Germany as the home of its most classic 
productions. 

The ethical element has its realm in morals, its 
seat in conscience, its culmination in character, 
and its revelations in life. The ethical factor has 
its basis in human nature, but is evolved by con- 
tact of man with man, and by means of religious 
influences. In Christianity religion and ethics 
are organically connected ; but in other cases the 
same close relation has not existed between 
morals and religion. Often philosophers have 
developed ethical systems far beyond the morality 
of the prevalent religions. In the lower stages 
of culture the conceptions of morality are closely 
allied to utility ; that is held to be moral which 
is deemed best for the individual and society. 
The reign of ethics belongs to the future ; never 
in the past have men in general been controlled 
by ethical principles in their relations to one 
another. 

The religious force, judging from its univer- 
sality, belongs to human nature. It is doubtful 
whether any people exists without some religious 
notions. Travelers have repeatedly reported 



82 V^EW WINE SKINS 

such peoples, when later, after better acquaint- 
ance, it was found that they had some concep- 
tions of religion. Its non-existence in a definite 
form among the lowest people would no more 
prove it not innate than reason or the idea of 
causality are proved foreign to man because not 
found in a definite form among some primitive 
people. The philosopher Herbart declared that 
religion is more deeply rooted in human nature 
than philosophy. Not only is religion so uni- 
versal, but it is also one of the most potent of 
the social and historic forces. unquestion- 

ably arises from man's relation to the universe, 
though its origin cannot be determined scien- 
tifically. That it is the invention of priests or 
others for selfish ends, or is somehow imposed 
on man, has long ago been banished as a fiction. 
The rise of the great ethnic religions in the Orient 
is significant. 

The intellectual force comes last. In some 
degree it is found in all ages and conditions, and 
the exercise of all the other forces involves intel- 
lect. In the affectional force, however, feeling 
dominates; in the aesthetic the imagination ; while 
in ethics special prominence belongs to the will, 
and in religion the entire personality is involved. 
We need the intellectual as a special force for 
completeness of classification. We hear of intel- 
lect for intellect's sake, and we have in history 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 83 

intellectualism and rationalism as distinct and 
marked tendencies. This force creates schools, 
philosophy, science, and learned academies. 

I cannot here follow these various forces 
through their evolution. By means of develop- 
ment that which is involved in them in their 
embryonic form is evolved, what is implicit is 
made explicit. 

Every force is capable of an infinite variety of 
degrees and forms. Economics and religion afford 
good illustrations. This is not all ; no force ever 
acts by itself or in isolation. Whatever force is 
dominant in a society, others are in some measure 
connected with it. Taking now every force, 
with its differences in kind and degree, and com- 
bining it with all the kinds and degrees of the 
other forces, this gives a glimpse of the endless 
variety and complication found in society. Forces 
often antagonize each other ; thus the cultural 
may have to subordinate the physiological in 
order to develop. Especially is the ethical re- 
quired to subdue all that is unethical in the other 
forces that it may gain the ascendency. 

These forces give us humanity and history in 
epitome. They can be used for the study of an 
association, community, and age. All the forces 
may be found in a society, certainly all exist in a 
community and age ; the problem then presents 
itself, what the relative dominance of the forces 
is. If an age or society is predominantly eco- 



84 tKEW IVINE SKINS 

nomic, the question arises, what the economic 
force is exercised for, for the appetite, the affec- 
tion, recreation, ethics, religion, or intellectual 
pursuits. 

An important study of the ages and communi- 
ties consists in determining the changes which 
take place in the relative dominance of the forces. 
The noisiest and most striking forces are by no 
means always sure of the victory and of perma- 
nence. What is deep and quiet, and in harmony 
with human nature and ethics and truth, contains 
the elements of final success. Sometimes a force 
remains as strong as before, but loses in relative 
dominance because others are more fully devel- 
oped. Religion may have lost only relatively in 
comparison with economics, not absolutely. Once 
Trinity Church was the most conspicuous object 
when one approached New York from the sea. 
It still stands as it did before ; but great business 
blocks now tower above its steeple, and they are 
seen while it is obscured. The Wall Street it 
faces and the tide of humanity sweeping down 
Broadway arrest the attention of the stranger 
more than the church standing silently in the 
cemetery of the dead of former ages. The 
church has not changed, but the world has. 

Were a pyramid formed of the constitutional 
and cultural forces, the former would constitute 
the broad base, the cultural would occupy less 
and less space, while the intellectual, truth for 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 85 

truth's sake, might form the apex. It is in re- 
spect to the lower forces that men are most alike, 
though in degree the difference is great. It is 
chiefly the cultural forces which differentiate men 
one from another. 

An intellectual apprehension of the social forces 
is not enough for the study of their operation ; it 
must also be known what feeling and will are 
behind to impel them. Indeed, every force must 
be viewed in connection with all the psychological 
factors it involves. The same doctrine which is 
now cold, is then fanaticism ; now inactive, then 
promoted with fiery zeal. 

The associations formed by each force is impor- 
tant, but each person can trace them for himself. 
The whole world is covered by economic combi- 
nations of various kinds. The martial force is 
concentrated in the army, the political in the 
state. The appetitive force is one of the most 
powerful, but it acts through general society 
rather than through formal association. But so- 
cieties chiefly for its exercise exist, though its 
operations are often in secret. The affectional 
force rules the family in its best state, though in 
its lower forms the economic and appetitive forces 
enter largely into the family relation. Sponta- 
neous as the recreative force is and acting as it 
has opportunity, it also, as shown above, has 
formed many associations. All the cultural forces 



86 &(EIV WINE SKINS 

have been the creators of many societies, such as 
those of artists, ethical societies, churches, 
schools, and learned academies. 

The use of these forces for reformatory pur- 
poses is valuable. In every instance the exact 
situation must be learned. Let a community be 
analyzed for the purpose of determining the rela- 
tive dominance of the forces. A little scientific 
investigation will soon show how worthless the 
ordinary opinions on the subject are. Inquiry 
generally proves a far greater prevalence of eco- 
nomics and the constitutional forces than is sup- 
posed. In most communities it will likely be 
found that money-making and pleasure-seeking, 
and the gratification of the appetite, leave aes- 
thetics, ethics, religion, and intellect far in the 
rear. One city of some fifteen thousand inhabit- 
ants, which is a college town and favorably situ- 
ated for religion, was found on thorough investi- 
gation to be dominated first by industrial pursuits, 
second by pleasure, third and fourth by the edu- 
cational and religious forces. 

Often suppression by culture is the most effect- 
ive method of reform. The lower elements can- 
not rule if the mind and heart are absorbed by 
the higher. Some noble substitute for the saloon 
is the surest remedy for this curse. Error is 
overcome by the culture of truth, appetite is sub- 
dued by the supremacy of ethics and religion. 
Cut down a weed and it may grow again, but 



THE SOCIAL FORCES 87 

plant a fruit tree in its place and its end is 
assured. Is there not an organism of the cultural 
forces, a cooperation in which each promotes all, 
and is there not a waste of effort so long as a 
cultural force is isolated instead of being culti- 
vated in connection with its natural allies? 

These considerations make it evident that so- 
ciety need not be controlled by natural selection. 
It can choose, for instance, the ethical element, 
and work toward the realization of its dominance. 
The individual and society can put rational selec- 
tion in place of natural selection, and make the 
survival of the fittest mean, not the strongest and 
best adapted physically, but the most ethical. 

A single lecture can hardly give an idea of the 
wealth of thought in the social forces, certainly 
cannot exhaust it. What has been said may lead 
into what has been omitted, if one will take up 
the subject for further study and for a prac- 
tical application of the results of the investigation. 
It is self-evident that we cannot weigh and meas- 
ure these forces as we do objects of nature ; but 
even if we must be satisfied with mere estimates, 
they may furnish valuable material for thought 
and effort. 

A study of these forces and of their application 
makes us painfully aware of a great lack which 
here can be barely mentioned. We have a sci- 
ence for the accumulation of wealth, but no sci- 
ence of its use. The fruit of economics is left to 



88 XKEW WINE SKINS 

haphazard ; hence the uncertainty, the folly, we 
might say insanity, so common in the use, or 
rather abuse, of wealth. Is there not here room 
for a great science, the science which determines 
in what degree industrial pursuits shall minister 
to the other forces, in order that the true end of 
life may be attained, the great science of the 
future? 



The Problem of Philosophical 
Interpretation 



IV 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 

BY 
PROFESSOR F. C. ROBINSON, A. M., 

Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Natural Science, 
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me. 



Science and Religion 



A recent writer raises the question as to why 
a man who studies natural science should be 
thought specially qualified to discuss and speak 
authoritatively on religion. He does not answer 
his query in a satisfactory manner, and neither 
can I. Indeed, if scientific study, by teaching a 
man the necessity of confining his thoughts 
strictly to the matter in hand, or in common lan- 
guage to "mind his own business," tends to do 
anything, it is, as it seems to me, to unfit one 
for religious discussion. Science deals with the 
material, religion with the immaterial. Science 
deals with the sensual, religion with the super- 
sensual. 

It cannot be possible that this right to speak 
with authority on all things, including religion, has 
been granted to scientists because they have 
claimed it ! They are too modest for that, at 
least I am sure chemists are. 

I am afraid, however, that in early times 
scientists were not as modest about claiming 
things as they are now. There seems to be con- 
siderable evidence that far back in the dim past 
even chemists claimed to know a great deal more 
than they do now about things and powers gen- 



94 ${E\V WINE SKINS 

erally regarded as ghostly. One of the most 
necessary accompaniments of a course in chem- 
istry in those days was the ability on the part of 
the instructor to raise the devil, not generally, of 
course, but very particularly, each one having 
his own peculiar devil, who — or which — came at 
his bidding. 

Indeed, I rather trace back to those times this 
idea of the peculiar fitness of a man in my pro- 
fession to speak with authority on religious mat- 
ters. It is a survival. It should have, and does 
have, the honor and respect accorded to things 
ancient. Naturally it has gathered something as 
it has rolled down through the centuries, the most 
notable accretions being that we are now thought 
to be experts in things relating to both God and 
the devil, instead of the devil alone. But such 
growth is only natural. Science takes a much 
broader outlook in every way than it once did. 

These arguments are given for what they are 
worth ; candor compels me to say that I do not 
find them wholly satisfactory, but you may. I 
wish I could feel that the rest of my argument 
was as clear as this even. 

Now in spite of the fact that there are such 
good historic grounds for claiming the right to tell 
you exactly the relations between science and 
religion, I do not propose to exercise that right at 
this time. I shall speak of science chiefly, and 
if what I say has any bearing upon religion I am 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 95 

sure you will see it yourselves. The fact is, 1 
am more willing to be responsible for your science 
than for your religion. I do not mean that I have 
no settled opinion on the matter. I do not intend 
at this period of my life to attempt the role of the 
so-called independent in discussing a great ques- 
tion like this. I never have studied much the art 
of not forming an opinion. I know it is a great 
art, and much cultivated in these days, but I am 
afraid I am too old to learn it, even supposing I 
have the necessary brain power, a very gratui- 
tous supposition, I am sure. Whatever matter I 
present I hope to present fairly, but I shall not 
try to conceal what I think of its bearing. 

It is but saying what has been said so many 
times recently that we are almost weary of it, 
when I remark that the century just closed has 
witnessed greater advance in natural science than 
all those which have preceded it. 

It is true that when we examine more closely 
we find that this advance has been more in utili- 
zation of principles and forces already known 
than in the discovery of new ones, but this serves 
only to modify the statement, not to nullify it. 
So long as we broaden our horizon I do not know 
that it makes any difference whether we ascend a 
hill or an Eiffel tower. But it is almost self-evi- 
dent that not much of this progress has any bear- 
ing upon the question of religion — that is, any di- 
rect bearing. Indirectly, of course, it has exerted 



96 WEIV WINE SKINS 

quite an influence. The more man's wants are 
ministered to by application of natural laws, the 
less need he feels for spiritual ministration. This 
influence is especially strong upon those whose 
religious beliefs have contained a large element of 
superstition. As they have seen one after an- 
other of what they have supposed to be evidences 
in nature of God's actions explained by natural 
laws, they have been ready to believe the claims 
of agnostics and atheists that everything in 
nature is thus explainable. When a man is 
brought up to believe that God's government of 
nature is like that of a man driving an ox team, 
who encourages one with a word and touches up 
another with his goad as occasion seems to re- 
quire, it is hard for him to readjust himself to any 
other conception when that is made to appear 
untenable. It seems to me perfectly fair to say 
that discoveries in natural science affect religion 
only as they relate to the origin and constitution 
of matter and force, and to the ongoing of things. 

What is the last word of science as to these 
things? Or to put it more modestly and prop- 
erly, what do I understand to be that last word? 

First as to matter, science believes more 
strongly to-day than it ever has, perhaps, that 
matter exists. There are no facts with which I 
am acquainted which tend to show that material 
things are delusions or lies. We are forced to 
believe not only in its real existence, but in its 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 97 

perpetual existence. We know no method or 
process by which the smallest particle of matter 
can be created or destroyed. Its form can be 
changed, but nothing we can do affects in the 
slightest degree its increase or decrease. This is 
one of the results of scientific progress of the last 
century, although it was very early in it that it 
began to be apprehended. 

As to how it exists, we cannot be as positive. 

We can say that there are, in its lowest ele- 
mentary form, something less than one hundred 
different kinds of matter, called the chemical 
elements, but just what those are we do not 
know, and are not making much progress in find- 
ing out. Some things seem established about 
them ; they are composed of small granules called 
atoms, so exceedingly small that the imagination 
fails as completely to comprehend their smallness 
as it does the distances of the planets and stars. 
It has been found possible to measure these sizes 
approximately, and the figures are instructive. 
Thus a molecule of hydrogen gas is not larger 
than nineteen billionths of an inch in diameter, 
and the number of them in one cubic inch at the 
freezing point of water is about one hundred and 
ten sextillions, or no with eighteen ciphers an- 
nexed. If these were placed in a row just touch- 
ing each other they would make a line extending 
32,000,000 miles, or one-third the distance from 
the earth to the sun. Taking the population of 



98 tHEW WINE SKINS 

the world at 1,500,000,000, if every man, wom- 
an, and child should pick up a molecule of hydro- 
gen and all put them down in a row, the row 
would be less than a yard long. 

Bear in mind that I am talking now of a mole- 
cule of hydrogen, and not of an atom, and that 
the molecule is made up of atoms, two at least, 
which are undoubtedly at some distance from 
each other. The atomic sizes are perhaps ten 
times as small as the figures given. We must not 
consider that these granules called molecules and 
atoms touch each other ; science has demonstrated 
that they do not. More than that, it has shown 
about how far apart they are in gases at least. 
Thus the molecules of the gases in the air 
are distant from each other at least fourteen 
times their diameters, at common temperatures. 
This is a small distance when we consider how 
small their diameters are — .000000019 of an inch ; 
but when we compare it with those diameters and 
with other space relations, we see that they are 
relatively a good distance from each other. Thus 
the moon is about thirty times the earth's diam- 
eter from the earth. If the moon were brought 
into about one-half her present distance, she 
would be about the relative distance from the 
earth that the air molecules are from each other. 
The molecules of solids and liquids are nearer 
together, but there is every reason to believe that 
they are very far from touching. It is scientific- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 99 

ally safe to say that, taking the earth as a whole, 
the matter or material of it occupies only a frac- 
tion of the space it takes up ; that is, that another 
earth, and probably several of them, could be 
put in with ours without making it any larger. 

Science says further that these granules are 
not quietly resting in their places, but are in con- 
stant motion. The particles of the air are flying 
about among themselves with the greatest rapid- 
ity: they travel about one thousand feet per 
second, and in doing it hit each other constantly. 
In fact, each air molecule hits its neighbor about 
five thousand million times a second. Not only 
do they move in straight lines with such prodig- 
ious velocities, they also have other motion, as of 
rotation and vibration, that is, of turning round 
like the earth, and going back and forth like a 
piano string or tuning-fork. No means has been 
found to determine with any accuracy the time of 
rotation of an atom, but it is evidently faster than 
that of any known heavenly body. One calcu- 
lation shows that while light, which travels, as 
is well known, 186,000 miles per second, is mov- 
ing one-millionth of an inch, a hydrogen molecule 
turns around once. It can be shown with greater 
accuracy that gaseous molecules vibrate, say five 
thousand millions of million times a second. 

Of course I know that these figures mean but 
little ; we cannot comprehend them. Do you ask 
me now what matter is? If so, you see why 



100 ViEW WWE SKINS 

neither I nor anyone else can answer. Even sup- 
posing we could see an atom or molecule, the 
difficulty of inspecting the details of a locomotive 
while it was passing at the rate of sixty miles an 
hour would be as nothing to that of inspecting a 
moving molecule. It would seem that when the 
microscope has been increased in power one thou- 
sand times at least, and some means has been 
found to stop them, we shall be able to see atoms. 
When we come to consider further, however, that 
if an atom stopped its motion it probably would 
cease to exist and disappear, the outlook for ever 
seeing them is certainly not encouraging. 

There is a general rather ill-defined notion 
abroad that science has extended its knowledge 
back to certain simple forms of matter, and that 
these bear the same relation to more complex 
forms that the bricks of a building do to the com- 
pleted structure. The fact is, on the other hand, 
that what we call the elemental forms of matter 
are really the most complex and difficult to be 
understood of all things in the universe. Every 
additional fact we learn about them increases the 
difficulty of comprehending them. I can under- 
stand a man better than I can an atom. Indeed, 
I think the whole process of evolution has in one 
sense been misunderstood. There is a very real 
sense in which it is not the elaboration of the 
complex out of the simple, but the simplifying of 
the complex. We may speak of a complex build- 



SCIENCE ANT) RELIGION 101 

ing being developed out of the simple pieces of 
wood and bricks and metal, but not of a man as 
developed out of simple material atoms, because 
there are no such things. It is so all through in- 
organic nature also. As I have witnessed the 
formation of such common things as water and 
salt from their chemical elements, the thought 
has come to me, again and again, how much easier 
it is to comprehend them than to understand how 
the given elements could form them ! We see 
the things done so often that it seems a matter 
of course, but consider for a moment the prop- 
erties of two such elements as hydrogen and 
oxygen, and sodium and chlorine, and conceive, 
if you can, how it is possible that they can form 
water and salt. It is comparatively plain when 
we inspect the organs of an animal body to see 
how each part has a certain office to peform, and 
all combine to do the work required, but the 
farther one goes back in nature the harder it is 
to comprehend how the parts contribute to the 
results obtained. When we chemists come to 
deal with what are generally called the complex 
compounds of organic chemistry, we begin to see 
the function of some of the elements or radicals 
in the compounds, but we have not the slightest 
idea of the function of the sodium in the salt. In 
this sense, when we say that salt is a union of 
sodium and chlorine, we give about as complete 
a definition of it as the boy did when in answer to 



102 ${EIV WINE SKINS 

his teacher he said, " Salt is what makes potatoes 
not taste good when you don't put any on." 

Of course there are theories as to what atoms 
are, but no one of them makes them any less 
complex. I shall refer later to some of these. It 
is enough for my present purpose to make the 
single point that as far back as modern science 
has carried its investigations upon matter and its 
origin it finds increasing support to the simple 
statement, "In the beginning God created the 
heavens and the earth." The very beginnings 
of things are so complex and yet so wonderfully 
adapted to the work accomplished that they could 
have originated only from an intelligent power 
and will of superhuman order.* 

The development of an animal from an egg is a 
further illustration of this point. From a physio- 
logical or anatomical standpoint the egg is rela- 
tively simple, but when we come to consider the 
qualities which it must contain, which are brought 
out as the individual develops, we must recognize 
its infinite complexity, and see that such develop- 

* The recent work of Prof. J. J. Thompson is a striking confirmation of 
this idea that the atom is exceedingly complex. By experiments con- 
ducted on X-ray and other electric phenomena, he is led to the conclusion 
that what we know as the chemical atoms are composed of at least a 
thousand distinct and of course smaller corpuscles. His views do not 
do away with our present atomic hypothesis rightly held, but show that 
besides the magnitudes called molecules and atoms, there is a third mag- 
nitude almost infinitely smaller. Modern chemistry has never taught 
that atoms are indivisible, but only that as yet they have not been divided. 
The possibility of such division has been freely recognized. Prof. 
Thompson's experiments simply make that possibility a reality. 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 103 

ment is really the unfolding and simplifying of the 
complex. So a machine constructed is simpler 
than the same in the mind of the inventor. This 
same idea may be followed out in any direction, 
and will, I think, be found always true. There 
is much valuable information from the study of 
each wheel of a machine, but we really only 
comprehend the machine after they are all in 
place and moving together as the maker intended. 
The whole is simpler that any of its parts. We 
speak of judging the present by the past, but we 
make more accurate judgment of the past by the 
present, for the present is a development and 
simplifying of the past. No one can rightly claim 
that things in the universe are yet simple and 
easy to be understood, but I have a most profound 
conviction that whether we regard the physical, 
mental, or moral world, or all together, — regard 
them, I mean, in the broadest possible way, — we 
cannot but be convinced that all are working 
towards simplicity, and this to me is overwhelm- 
ing evidence of Divine plan in it all. 

But it is to our knowledge of force and energy 
that the past century has contributed most. The 
most profound and far-reaching contribution is the 
final establishment of the principle of the persist- 
ence of force, more generally called the con- 
servation of energy. In all the preceding ages of 
the world and down to the middle of the last 
century force was looked upon as something apart 



104 VKEIV WINE SKINS 

from matter, working on it but not necessary to 
it. Its generation and destruction were not 
doubted. The experiments of that gifted New 
Hampshire Yankee known in scientific literature 
as Count Rumford of Bavaria gave the first data 
which led to the overthrow of the earlier ideas; 
but, as is generally the case, the full bearing of 
his experiments in changing work to heat was 
not seen until many years after he made them. 
The idea was too great and novel to be grasped 
at once. Rumford himself only grasped part of 
it. It was only after Davy, and Faraday, and 
Joule, and Mayer, and Helmholtz, and many 
others had contributed their work and thought, 
that it obtained complete recognition. 

It is now seen that force can no more be de- 
stroyed than matter, that it is a part of matter. 
We know it in different modes of manifestation 
as heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical 
affinity, etc., but these are but manifestations of 
the atomic movements already referred to. If 
one disappears in the slightest degree, an equiva- 
lent amount of some other appears. We cannot 
say that matter and force are identical, but we 
can say that the destruction or creation of the one 
involves that of the other. The best way of sum- 
ming it all up is to speak of the "persistence of 
substance," the word substance including matter, 
force, and energy. Neither the raising of my 
hand nor the turning of the mightiest mill-wheel 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 105 

adds in the slightest degree to the force in the 
world. It is all a perfect compensation ; what 
one gains in motion, another loses. 

Of course the full comprehension of this law 
can come only when we learn to recognize mo- 
tions not apparent to our ordinary senses. When 
a rifle ball strikes a target, or a hammer an anvil, 
the visible motion of each is destroyed, but what 
actually happens is that the motion of the count- 
less millions of atoms and molecules of the target 
and anvil is correspondingly increased. 

No scientific discovery seems to have such an 
important bearing on religion as this. Its first 
announcement shook the very foundations of 
religion as they had been built up in the minds of 
many, and when its application was made to the 
forces connected with human life and growth, and 
its apparently perfect working there also was 
proved, very many of such foundations were 
completely overthrown. If it does not actually 
banish God from the universe, it seems at first 
thought to do so. If all the force I generate as I 
go on living and thinking actually comes from the 
food and water and air I consume ; if there is no 
movement without oxygen and " no thought with- 
out phosphorus," as Moleschott put it, — what need 
of longer keeping up the fiction of God working 
in me, or that there is such a thing as a soul? 
What wonder that Tyndall, the great physicist, 
should exclaim, " I see in matter the promise and 



106 &CEIV WINE SKINS 

potency of every form and quality of terrestrial 
life!" Materialism had always been a cherished 
belief of many, but the law of persistence of sub- 
stance seems to give reasonable ground for such 
belief, even if it does not make it an intellectual 
necessity. Haeckel, in his recent book, "The 
Riddle of the Universe," accepts such a belief as 
necessary, and tries to show how a certain 
amount of comfort can be obtained from it. 

The Religionist may insist that the original 
atoms of matter must have been created by 
Divine power, but if there is no further evidence 
or need of that power in the universe, he might 
as well give up his God altogether. 

The question turns, it seems to me, on this 
point. Do matter and force explain everything 
in the universe ? If they do, the materialistic 
position is impregnable from a scientific stand- 
point, at least. Of course, if we include the sun 
and planets in the universe, as evidently we 
should, we must believe that what we know as 
matter is but an insignificant part of the whole. 
For millions upon millions of miles there can be 
no matter at all. The earth plunges along in its 
orbit with not the slightest evidence of retardation 
or friction. This could not be if space was filled 
with the slightest trace of what we know as 
matter. Furthermore, we saw when considering 
atoms that even in the solidest material things 
these cannot touch each other, but are at consid- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 107 

erable distances apart. Taking the earth as a 
whole, I suppose that if all material atoms touched 
each other, the resulting mass would not be more 
than one one-hundredth of the present size of it. 
That is, at least one hundred times as much mat- 
ter could be put into the space the earth occupies. 
But what is now in that space ? There must be 
something. It is meaningless and unscientific to 
say it is a vacuum. The old Greek philosophers 
could speculate as to whether nothing could exist, 
but we cannot. Here, then, is by far the larger 
part of the universe which matter and force do 
not explain ! But we do not leave it alone ; we 
imagine it as filled by what is called the ether, or 
if not filled, to contain this ether. This becomes 
to our imagination the medium of communication 
between atoms, whether as near as in a piece of 
iron or as far distant as the sun and stars. This is 
not another kind of material or matter, for there 
is only one of all the properties of matter which 
we can prove that it possesses. It has no weight, 
no atoms, no attraction, no friction, and the only 
thing in which it corresponds to matter is its prop- 
erty of taking a stress or strain. It is wholly 
bewildering to attempt to compare it with matter. 
Thus, impulses are transmitted through material 
things in proportion to their rigidity ; sound 
travels through the air at the rate of one thou- 
sand and ninety feet a second, but through a bar 
of tempered steel ten or fifteen times as fast ; but 



108 V^EJV WINE SKINS 

an impulse travels through ether at the rate of 
186,000 miles a second. This implies a rigidity 
far in excess of the hardest steel, but yet the 
earth plunges on through it, pushing it aside 
without the least friction, and we all remember 
the old experiment showing how in a vacuum, 
which is by no means pure ether, a feather is no 
more retarded in dropping than a piece of lead. 

One of the most ingenious theories of the con- 
stitution of material atoms is that they are formed 
of portions of this ether, moving with what are 
called vortex motions, such as the rings of smoke 
have when ejected from orifices by sudden im- 
pulses. This has been called the "doughnut 
theory " of atoms, although it has been recently 
so modified that instead of reminding us of that 
simple article of food of Yankee manufacture, it 
is better typified by the German pretzel. I have 
no intention of throwing any discredit upon the 
theory of these comparisons. As Serjeant Buzfuz 
said about the warming pan, " the doughnut is an 
article of household economy to be treated with 
the greatest respect." The main point is that 
between the material atoms there is a space filled 
in some way, a world many times larger than the 
material one, into which as yet hardly anything 
but our imaginations have penetrated. Of what 
is going on there we can have but the slightest 
conception. 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 109 

It may not be so easy to show that there are 
forces in nature as little amenable to the laws of 
the conservation of energy as the ether is to the 
laws of matter, but a good many scientists are 
convinced that such is the fact, and the convic- 
tion is certainly spreading. Indeed, it seems to 
me that the law of the persistence of force has 
been and will continue to be one of the greatest 
aids in establishing on the firmest foundation the 
belief in a distinct, vital, intellectual, and spiritual 
power. The very thing it was supposed to 
destroy it actually preserves. 

Let us look at it for a moment. If I swing my 
hand through the air, the energy I create comes 
from the destruction of tissue within my body. 
My heart beats a little faster, I take in a little 
more oxygen in the form of breath ; in short, gain 
at one point is accompanied by equivalent loss at 
another. If I stop my arm-motion by a blow 
upon the desk, the desk takes up the motion thus 
stopped. It is the same thing in the inorganic 
world. If I throw a piece of zinc into sulphuric 
acid it immediately begins to dissolve and the 
liquid grows hot, but if I connect a strip of copper 
to the zinc before putting it into the acid and then 
bend the copper and put the other end into the 
acid also, the zinc dissolves as before, but there is 
less heating of the liquid because a certain part 
of the heat is changed to electricity and circles 
round through the liquid and the copper strip. I 



110 tKEW WINE SKINS 

may get my force all as one kind or as several 
kinds, but I get it all ; not the slightest trace is 
lost. 

Now no one will deny that thought is a distinct 
power. If we measure it by what it accom- 
plishes it is the greatest power in the universe. 
Does it come under this law of conservation of 
energy ? The materialist answers yes at once, 
for is it not always accompanied by physical 
actions — movement of blood to the brain and de- 
struction of brain tissue ? That may all be, and 
still it does not answer the question. Rush of 
blood to the brain and destruction of brain tissue 
are sources of energy in the form of heat and 
electric currents. Now if thought is a material 
force its exercise must have some effect on this 
development of heat and electricity. If we have 
more thought we should have less heat, and con- 
versely. But there is no such relation. The 
changes in the brain with thought are just the 
same as without. The destruction of tissue there 
follows the same law as to heat development that 
it does in any other part of the body. It is true 
that when a man is engaged in hard mental work 
he requires more food, but the oxidation of that 
food gives the same amount of heat with thought 
as without it. Hence Simon Newcomb says, 
" All the force taken in in the form of food is ex- 
pended in the production of heat and muscular 
action ; there is nothing left to be transformed 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 111 

into thought." . And John Fiske says : " Such re- 
duction [of thought to molecular action] is utterly 
beyond the bounds of possibility ; the dynamic 
circuit is absolutely complete without taking psy- 
chical manifestation into account at all." 

One other thing shows how entirely outside the 
law of conservation of energy mental power is, 
and that is the very different results following the 
same expenditure of materials. We have no 
reason to suppose that Shakespeare required more 
than his regular three meals a day while he was 
writing his immortal works. Without any disre- 
spect to the various poets who have begun already 
to prepare for those " times of outpouring " which 
come in June of each year, I have little doubt but 
what their brain waste will be fully as much as 
was that of John Milton during an equal time 
while writing "Paradise Lost." 

What erected the massive piers and swung out 
over the river the great Brooklyn bridge? Not 
the steam engines and moving muscles of certain 
men, but the brain power of John A. Roebling, 
and yet probably very many of the common 
laborers upon it were suffering as much brain 
waste from a physical standpoint as he. 

We cannot escape the conclusion that there are 
forces of the greatest consequence in the world 
not governed by the laws of conservation of 
energy, but penetrating and interacting with 
forces which are so governed even as the ether 
penetrates and interacts with matter. 



112 WEJV WINE SKINS 

Once grant also that such forces exist, and 
there is the strongest of reasons for believing that 
they also persist, or are indestructible, like all 
other fundamental things in nature. And here it 
seems to me that science strengthens greatly, 
even if it does not absolutely make sure, the hope 
of intelligent immortality. That I am not alone 
in this opinion, let me quote from a recent article 
by the eminent engineer and scientist, R. H. 
Thurston, who writes as follows : " There is 
evidently a law of persistence of all existence, 
whether of matter, force, energy, or organic 
vitality, including intellectual and soul life.'* 

Now this idea of the persistence of all exist- 
ence, which is, I think, one of the greatest truths 
ever enunciated, requires quite careful considera- 
tion or it will be misunderstood. It means simply 
that all things which are fundamental and un- 
changeable here will forever remain so. It makes 
immortality a scientific necessity, but not immor- 
tality of things as they are. A piece of wood 
exists and will exist forever, not however in its 
present form ; it is absurd to believe that, for 
throw it into the fire and that form is destroyed 
forever, but the material atoms of which it is 
made are not thus destroyed and never can be. 
They may go to form other pieces of wood and 
doubtless will, for nothing is more interesting in 
nature than the economical using over and over 
again of the same materials. I repeat, immor- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 113 

tality of matter from a scientific standpoint is the 
immortality of atoms and not of atomic structures 
or compounds. 

The same is true of persistence or immortality 
of the forces of matter. We cannot create or de- 
stroy any one of them, but can change them 
indefinitely. We cannot scientifically believe in 
the immortality of any particular amount of heat, 
any more than of the piece of wood. It may be 
heat now, and electricity to-morrow, and light the 
day after. Only those fundamental atomic 
movements which are back of all these forces are 
forever the same, and hence immortal. 

Now if those forces which go to make up the 
intellectual and soul life of an intelligent being 
are, like those other forces, dependent upon and 
leaborated from atomic vibrations ; if they are 
mutually convertible into each other and into 
other forces of nature ; if they follow the great 
principle of conservation of energy, — then they 
are immortal only as light, heat, and electricity 
are immortal, that is, as primary atomic motions, 
and annihilation of the individual results. But as 
I have already said, or implied, there is this great 
difference. Intellectual or spiritual or soul power, 
call it what you will, is not convertible into any- 
thing else. Material changes accompany its action, 
but there is in no sense a conversion of the one 
into the other. Consider the matter of thought, 
how unchangeable it is ; no matter what it does it 



114 tHElV WINE SKINS 

remains the same, or is even increased. If elec- 
tricity does work, you have so much more work 
done, and so much less electricity. Not so with 
thought ; whatever it does, itself remains undi- 
minished. The organism through which it acts 
may suffer exhaustion, but thought itself once 
manifested can never be destroyed. I am trying 
to speak in a strictly scientific manner in this. I 
am not trying to warp or bend facts to support 
any particular theory. I am forced to this con- 
clusion. Show me any facts of science which 
are against it and I am ready to modify my views. 
Of course I must believe that things unchanged 
and unchangeable will remain so. If an indi- 
vidual owes his individuality to his intellectual, 
spiritual, and moral powers ; if his bodily organs 
are merely repetitions of those of all his fellows ; 
then though these latter decay and go back to 
their original elements to be used over and over 
again perhaps, individual immortality is his by 
the persistence of those powers which cannot be 
destroyed. Whether these immortal powers and 
forces can be changed after they are separated 
from material atoms by the death of the indi- 
vidual is a question of a good deal of interest, 
but one upon which science has little to say. 
Analogy alone would lead us to think that they 
could not be. So far as we can see, while their 
existence is not dependent upon matter, their de- 
velopment is. This question naturally suggests 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION ll $ 

that other one as to whether they are ever again 
associated with matter, that is as to a bodily resur- 
rection. What has already been said answers 
this to a certain extent. We have seen that the 
same material atoms are doubtless used again and 
again, but we have also seen that there is an in- 
finite amount of ether from which the material 
atoms were possibly made, and if enough matter 
was actually created to provide bodies identical in 
every respect for all the races of men who have 
ever existed, and animals too for that matter, it 
would have no perceptible disturbing influence 
on the present structure of the universe. Of 
course this would seem to necessitate either a 
resurrection at some time in the future or at some 
other place than on this earth. These ideas are 
not advanced as arguments for a bodily resurrec- 
tion of either kind, but only to show that science 
is not able to speak positively on such matters. 
One of the most incorrect notions held to by 
many is that science has proved that a bodily 
resurrection, as well as many other ideas ad- 
vanced by religious teachers, is impossible. I 
wish simply to correct such notions. Natural 
Science, like all other sciences, gets the credit for 
proving a great deal more than it ever has proved. 
There are various other side paths which we 
could take here, but all would lead us too far 
afield. One of the most suggestive, perhaps, 
leads in this direction. If individual material 



116 ^EJV JVINE SKINS 

atoms may have belonged to several bodies and 
hence immortality of the same bodies or even re- 
creation of the same bodies from the same atoms 
is impossible, would the same principle apply to 
the intellectual and spiritual powers? Would the 
immortality of an individual depend in any degree 
upon whether he had actually created or allowed 
to be created in him a distinct individuality? If 
all that makes him up here really originated with 
some one else, if by no exercise of his powers 
has he accomplished anything which can be called 
individual, is there any individual to him ? 
Doesn't he really belong to someone else or to 
several others, and will not it end thus ? Is there 
not a suggestion of this in the parable of the 
talents and the unfruitful fig tree ? It seems to 
me that this thought is far more important than 
that of a bodily resurrection. 

But there is one postulate of religion which 
has not yet entered to any extent into my 
argument. It is that of a God ruling and guid- 
ing the universe he has made. All that I have 
done thus far is to show that there seems to 
be a scientific necessity to believe that such 
an intelligence created matter and force in the 
beginning, and that there is plenty of space in 
which he can work now without disturbing the 
fixed laws of matter and force. All that I have 
said about immortality has no necessary connec- 
tion with him at all as a guiding force in the on- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 117 

going of things. What I offer on this point I put 
forth with many misgivings. My special training 
in science has not fitted me to discuss it. My at- 
tention is taken up almost wholly with matter and 
the forces which are governed by the law of the 
conservation of energy. These forces are not 
modified in the slightest degree, so far as I have ever 
found, by any outside influence. If I prepare the 
proper materials and arrange the conditions for a 
certain result to take place, I do not believe that 
that result will be modified by any influence, how- 
ever mighty. Thought cannot create heat any 
more than heat can thought. I do not wish to 
pass a snap judgment on so-called psychic power. 
It very likely has its field of operation, but I do 
not think that field is a chemical laboratory. 
There are " unfavorable conditions" in such a 
place, which are hard to overcome. 

But I can see the possibility of guidance with- 
out the breaking of law. I am willing to go 
further than that. 1 cannot understand at all how 
the earth came into its present form and condi- 
tion without such guidance even before an intel- 
ligent creature had made his appearance. It is 
all very well to talk about evolution, and chance 
arrangements, and the influence of environment, 
and the survival of the fittest, but if the game 
was not played with loaded dice, so to speak, then 
no game ever was. As Prof. Shailer says in his 
recent work, "The Individual," a player may 



118 VXEW WINE SKINS 

throw "double sixes' ' once in a while without 
comment, but when he does it every time the 
stakes are piled high, and to fail to do it would 
lead to his ruin, we have reason to suspect that 
he knows how. Nothing can be clearer than 
that there must have been many critical points in 
the progress of development where it was just as 
easy to develop away from man as towards him, 
but at every one of them the right move was 
taken. And if there was guidance at certain 
points there probably was all along. Professor 
Japp, the eminent English chemist, has pointed 
out in a recent address how even in unorganized 
matter there is evidence of intelligent direction of 
forces of development. It is in the case of the 
so-called optically active substances, of which 
sugar is an example. These compounds begin to 
be suggested in certain crystals, and appear 
abundantly in vegetable and animal compounds ; 
indeed they seem peculiarly necessary to such 
structures. The peculiar effect on light seems to 
be due to lack of symmetry in the arrangement 
of certain of the atoms in the molecules. Pro- 
fessor Japp shows quite conclusively that chance 
arrangements of atoms would always give sym- 
metry, and never asymmetry; intelligence alone 
can cause lack of symmetry. Hand-made articles 
are never just alike, and there is something in us 
which prefers them just because of that fact. If 
humanity was the product of chance forces work- 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 119 

ing upon matter for countless ages, by this time 
every one of us would have been an exact coun- 
terpart of every other one, whereas we know 
that even in our bodies, the development of which 
was largely influenced by the action of fixed laws, 
there is great lack of symmetry of parts. In 
short, the actual outcome, the highest and last 
product of evolution or development in nature, is 
the individual, which in its lowest as well as 
highest example differs from every other one. 
Nature emphasizes differences and not uniformity. 
This point may easily be misunderstood. The 
individual which nature tends to develop is not 
the antagonistic type, but the harmonious. 

The first marked examples of individualization 
in nature are the crystals. These have sharp 
angles and edges. We find them here and 
there where the soil has been removed and 
the bare rock exposed, and they form beautiful 
specimens for our cabinets. We recognize them 
as survivals of past and primitive conditions. 
Most of their companions have long ago been dis- 
integrated and converted into soil from whence 
have come the less angular and more harmonious 
and higher individuals of the vegetable world, 
which in turn are used in developing the still 
higher individuals of animal life, which, with 
their added powers of locomotion, must be still 
more harmonious in their individualization. But 
nothing is more interesting in nature than the 



120 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

survival in higher forms of characteristics of 
lower. So this power of individualization by 
crystallization extends on; recently it has been 
found that even blood and the white of an egg 
can be crystallized. So, under peculiar condi- 
tions, human individuals, the highest of all, may 
develop antagonisms instead of harmonies, may 
grow angles and corners and sharp edges like a 
crystal. The most curious part of it all is that 
they think they are types of the highest devel- 
opment possible, when really they are but rever- 
sals to the old crystalline type, and, like the 
human appendix, are of no conceivable use and 
may cause a good deal of trouble. As a rule the 
body politic is better off when they are ampu- 
tated. 

It seems to me, then, that this development of 
the individual to the highest state of mental and 
moral perfection is plainly foreshadowed, and 
with this all the facts of science are in accord ; 
and here is where science is in the closest har- 
mony with religion as portrayed in the Christian 
system, at least. 

When the doctrine of evolution was first form- 
ulated it was objected to strongly by many 
Christian believers as being impossible because 
subversive, as they thought, of their belief. 
Many still think so. But truth is never sub- 
versive of truth, and it is now being seen that, 
like the fact of conservation of energy, evolution 



SCIENCE AND RELIGIOUS 121 

rightly considered works not harm, but good, to 
religion. We now see that evolution began when 
the atoms of matter were created, and has gone 
steadily on until the present, and will go on for 
an indefinite future. It has gone on, I believe, in 
three great epochs or divisions, two of which 
have been completed. The first epoch was the 
development of inorganic compounds up to the 
organic; the second was the development of 
organic structures ending in man's body, which 
in its perfect state marks, I believe, the end of 
bodily or material development; the third epoch 
began when mental and spiritual powers first 
appeared, and this is the all-important and un- 
completed living evolution of to-day. 

Each of these epochs has begun and gone irre- 
sistibly forward in obedience to the law which we 
call the survival of the fittest. It is a mistake to 
suppose that this law first appears in vegetable 
and animal life. Its operation can be seen as 
far back as the elements themselves. It is more 
than likely that those blanks seen in the table of 
elements when written in accordance with the 
periodic law, will never all be filled by the dis- 
covery of new elements, but that they represent 
elements not able to keep their identity, and so 
blotted out and merged into others very near the 
beginning of things. Nothing is more common 
than to find whole series of possible compounds 
in like manner unable to maintain themselves in 



122 tJiEW mm SKINS 

what may truly be called the struggle for exist- 
ence among inorganic things. Of course we are 
all familiar with this law in its operation in plants 
and animals. 

It is no less active in mental and spiritual 
evolution. Owing to the unchangeableness of 
mental and spiritual power already referred to, 
we cannot so follow to destruction in this world 
failure to make gain in these powers as we can in 
material evolution. That is, we cannot in case 
of individuals ; but no fact seems clearer than 
that nations and peoples who have failed in these 
respects, especially in spiritual development, have 
been blotted out. It has seemed to make no 
difference how much temporal power they have 
acquired, how many magnificent monuments 
they have raised; if they have added nothing to 
that progress towards the highest spiritual devel- 
opment they have gone down as surely as the 
thousands of forms and orders of plants and 
animals which stood in the way of the ongoing 
of material evolution. 

We are seeing also that evolution or develop- 
ment has gone on by the action of two great 
principles, internal forces and external stimuli. 
The immediate followers of Mr. Darwin saw 
clearly only the first of these, or recognized the 
other in a narrow sense under the name of influ- 
ence of environment. But it is now coming to be 
recognized that there must have been a general 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 123 

guidance of development far broader than physical 
environment. I have already referred to some 
evidences of this even back in the period of 
inorganic evolution, but it naturally comes out 
stronger and stronger as the higher stages of 
development begin. John Fiske accepts the ne- 
cessity of this in his recent book, " Through 
Nature to God," and it is certain to play a greater 
and greater part in the future study of evolution. 
It seems to me that it is the one thing needed 
to lift up and broaden the whole matter; to 
change the evolutionary philosophy from one of 
despair to one of hope ; to make it possible for 
an evolutionist to be an optimist rather than a 
pessimist. 

Read Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe" and 
see to what a lame and impotent conclusion he 
comes. At times he "whistles to keep up his 
courage " like a boy going through a lonely wood 
at night, but the only solution he offers for the 
riddle makes it even more of a riddle than before. 
Compare his ideas with those of Fiske and the 
school of broader evolutionists of to-day and note 
the difference; and note above all things that 
their views are, strictly speaking, as scientific 
as his, and I believe more so. No philosophy 
has ever made great progress that was not opti- 
mistic at bottom, and none ever will. 

In bringing these rambling remarks to a close I 
will not attempt to sum them up. If I should do 



124 O^EIV WINE SKINS 

so I might be led into making stronger statements 
as to what my argument seems to prove than 
would be justifiable. The trouble with too many 
discourses on this topic has been that statements 
too strong and positive have been made by ex- 
tremists on both sides. Defenders of religion in 
their zeal have been too fond of giving the im- 
pression that the old Latin Church fathers meant 
to convey when they prefaced their remarks with 
the phrase non ego sed dominm, this is not my 
opinion, but that of God ; and scientists in their 
reply have put the ego in place of the dominus in 
an equally authoritative manner. 

I am inclined to agree with Lord Bacon when 
he says, " To seek divinity in philosophy is like 
seeking the living among the dead," but I also 
believe that philosophy is not nearly as dead now 
as it was in his time. The religious notions a 
man holds will always be held very largely by an 
act of faith, but to me at least it is the source of 
the greatest satisfaction that the more I know of 
natural science, the more I look into the laws of 
nature, the more especially I consider these laws 
as a whole, the more my Christian faith is 
strengthened, and the more fully I can under- 
stand and enter into the thought of the poet : 

" And so in seasons of pleasant weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls get sight of the eternal sea 
Which brought us hither; 
Are in a moment carried thither, 
And see the children sporting on the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN 
FAITH 

BY 

REV. C. S. PATTON, A. M. 

Pastor of the University Congregational Church 
Ann Arbor, Mich. 



Herbert Spencer and the Christian Faith 



The pre-eminence of Mr. Spencer among think- 
ers of his own class consists in this : that before 
Darwin had published his " Origin of Species," 
or there had been any general discussion of the 
doctrine of evolution in its modern meaning, Mr. 
Spencer saw the evidence for that doctrine, ac- 
cepted it with an unreservedness which it has 
scarcely commanded even from its later apostles, 
and began the construction of a system of philos- 
ophy upon the basis of it. His work was thus 
very much larger and more important than Dar- 
win's. Darwin undertook the comparatively 
small task of proving man's physical descent from 
prehuman ancestors. Spencer undertook the 
vastly greater task of tracing the process of evo- 
lution through the entire range of animal and 
human life ; through ideas and customs, through 
political and ecclesiastical institutions and beliefs, 
through all human society. In other words, Mr. 
Spencer was the first man, and, with the excep- 
tion of his disciple, Mr. Fiske, has so far been 
practically the only man, to attempt an evolution- 
ary philosophy, instead of considering evolution 
as merely a department in biological science. 
This stupendous task he began some forty years 



128 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

ago in a series of volumes, the last of which 
reached completion but a few months since. The 
perseverence with which he has held to this task, 
through years of physical infirmity, indicates a 
strength of moral purpose altogether too uncom- 
mon. The entire accomplishment is a monument 
to the heroic enterprise of a devoted man. 

Mr. Spencer's personal attitude toward the 
Christian religion crops out in many incidental 
references throughout his books. The least that 
can be said of it is that for the Christian minister 
it is a decidedly uncomfortable one. I have often 
been disgusted, and felt like throwing down my 
book, at the sneers which mar his pages where 
he speaks of the Christian religion as it is em- 
bodied, taught, and practiced in the Christian 
world. I have often felt like writing him a letter 
and saying to him something like this : " Now 
look here ; you expect to revolutionize the world 
by your philosophy. So far as you expect to 
revolutionize religion, you can expect to do 
so only by the cooperation of Christian minis- 
ters. Their enlistment in behalf of your philos- 
ophy is the most important assistance that you 
can have or hope for. Why, then, do you so 
unmercifully and so unintermittently kick them? 
Or is that your idea of the way to gain a respect- 
ful hearing and a dispassionate consideration ? Is 
it a part of your philosophy that the best way to 
get a man to agree with you is to abuse him? " 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 129 

I have never written this letter and so cannot 
say what reply Mr. Spencer would make to it. But 
whatever he might say, his attitude of personal 
disrespect toward Christian ministers and Chris- 
tian institutions is not to be taken to mean too 
much. Such an attitude is easily accounted for. 
When Mr. Spencer began his work he met with the 
same ill treatment, the same suspicion, the same 
accusations of materialism and infidelity, that 
have been accorded to many great innovators ; and 
this, of course, principally from Christian minis- 
ters. Now, however sweet a man may naturally 
be, it is not in human nature for him to stand 
more than a certain amount of misrepresentation 
and vilification without getting into what may be 
called a " frame of mind." If Mr. Spencer could 
have been judged more fairly and more gener- 
ously, if he could have been given credit for what 
was true in his work and honorable in his effort, 
no doubt the majority of his flings at Christianity 
would never have seen the light. The most of 
them are probably as much chargeable to the 
Christian ministry as to Mr. Spencer. 

When we come to Mr. Spencer's religious 
philosophy, the first thing to be noticed is his 
doctrine of God. Now Mr. Spencer, so far from 
being an atheist, resolutely and consistently 
maintains his belief in the infinite. He goes so 
far as to declare that we know the existence of 
the infinite with a great deal more certainty than 



130 VtElV JVINE SKINS 

we know the existence of the finite, which is 
about as far as the most of us could go. But for 
him the infinite — or God — is the unknowable. 
This unknowable is the power, or force, or 
reality, or whatever one may choose to call it, 
behind all phenomena. But what we know is 
the phenomena ; the reality behind them we do 
not know, and cannot know. 

About this doctrine, of course, there is nothing 
new. It is the reappearance, in a slightly differ- 
ent form, of Kant's old difficulty about " things in 
themselves." It rises from two misconceptions : 
the false distinction between things as they are 
in themselves and things as they are for a think- 
ing subject, and an idea of the infinite which 
makes it exclusive of the finite instead of inclusive 
of it. If Mr. Spencer, at the beginning of his 
work, had set himself straight on these two con- 
ceptions, he would never have written so large a 
book about the unknowable. It seems as if he 
might have reflected that an infinite which is the 
mere negation of the finite, is nothing at all ; or 
that an infinite which excludes the finite is not 
infinite, for the simple reason that it is not all- 
inclusive. If the finite — or anything finite — 
stands outside of the infinite — over against it — 
then by the existence of that something outside 
of it the so-called infinite is limited, and is itself 
finite. But if all things which we behold, our- 
selves with the rest, are included in the infinite, 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 131 

then we know as much about the infinite at least 
as we know about things in general ; so far from 
God's being unknowable, all knowledge is ulti- 
mately knowledge of God. And what sense is 
there anyway in talking about the existence of 
anything that is unknowable ? If we mean abso- 
lutely unknowable, the only things that are un- 
knowable are round squares, and triangles without 
three sides, and square roots of odd numbers, 
and things equal to the same thing but not to 
each other ; that is to say, the only things that 
are really unknowable are the things that are 
unthinkable, and the only things that are un- 
thinkable — I do not mean to you or me, but to 
any intelligence however inclusive — are the 
things that do not exist and which there is no 
sense in talking about. Moreover, if when we 
say unknowable we mean absolutely unknowa- 
ble, we simply do not know that any such thing 
exists. For, whatever we know, we know by 
reason of some manifestation of it ; but that 
manifestation is necessarily, so far as it goes, an 
indication of the nature of the thing of which it is 
a manifestation ; therefore in order to know that 
a thing exists at all we must know in some degree 
what sort of a thing it is. The same thing that 
reveals its existence reveals necessarily in some 
degree at least its nature. If we cannot make 
any assertion about a given thing except that it 
exists, we cannot make even that. But Mr. 



132 3\f£ IV WINE SKINS 

Spencer is very sure of the infinite. He says 
over and again that the infinite, and not the finite, 
is the thing that we are certain of. He must 
then either give up this assurance, or else ac- 
knowledge that this infinite of whose existence 
we are so sure is an infinite which is neither 
unknowable nor unknown. 

Mr. Spencer, in apparent unconsciousness of 
what he is doing, accepts the latter alternative ; 
he does not mean that God is absolutely unknow- 
able. For he himself proceeds to make two very 
important assertions about God. He declares that 
God, or the infinite, is the source of all phenom- 
ena ; he is the infinite and eternal energy from 
which all things proceed ; and this same power, 
he also affirms, which is thus manifested in 
phenomena, manifests itself in us under the form 
of consciousness. Now the characteristic of the 
unknowable is that you cannot make any asser- 
tions about it whatever, except that it is. Ac- 
cording to Mr. Spencer himself then God is not 
absolutely unknowable, but only partially so. 
Very well, we do not any of us claim that any- 
body knows God, or can know him, entirely. 
Then the discussion between Mr. Spencer and 
any of us is not whether God can be known at 
all (which we both admit), nor whether he can 
be known altogether (which we neither of us 
claim), but only as to how far he can be known. 
This, which at first appeared like a fundamental 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 133 

and irreconcilable difference, turns out therefore 
to be only a difference in degree and not in kind. 

(It should be added parenthetically that this 
conception of God as the unknowable does not 
appear to be in any sense an essential part of the 
evolutionary philosophy.) 

If now we inquire further into the significance 
of the two affirmations which Mr. Spencer makes 
about his infinite, we shall find this to be, from 
the religious point of view, something considera- 
ble. Mr. Spencer's first assertion is that from 
this infinite and eternal energy all things proceed. 
Turn this statement into religious language and 
what does it mean? It is the same as to say that 
the author of all things is God ; without him is 
not anything made that is made ; from his fore- 
thought and care nothing is absent ; of his life all 
happenings are in some way a part ; or, in other 
words, " in Him we live and move and have our 
being." That is good doctrine, certainly. Take 
now the other affirmation, that this same power 
which is manifested in the universe at large wells 
up within ourselves under the form of conscious- 
ness. What does that mean? Why, that is 
the same as to say that God who is manifested 
in nature is manifested more fully in humanity ; 
that the mind which is in us is a part of the mind 
which is God ; in other words, that God is (as 
we have always been taught) the father of our 
spirits ; that the soul that dwells within us is no 



134 VKEJV JVINE SKINS 

stranger nor alien in the universe, that it did not 
come into being for the first time when it dawned 
in man, but it is only a coming-to-consciousness 
in man of that which has been forever self-con- 
scious in God. And not only so, but I am per- 
suaded that the reason Mr. Spencer refers to his 
infinite as an energy and not as a person is 
nothing more than the same superficial reason 
which led Matthew Arnold to deny that God was 
a person ; a misunderstanding, namely, of the 
meaning of the word person as a philosophical 
term. 

The second thing to be observed in Mr. Spen- 
cer's doctrine is his account of the origin of 
religion. Religion, he holds, originated in an- 
cestor worship, which in turn grew out of the 
phenomena of dreams. The savage lies down to 
sleep. He dreams. In his dream he stands, like 
Pharaoh, upon the bank of a river ; or he rides 
upon his horses ; he chases the deer and the 
buffalo ; he visits the tent of his relatives. He 
wakes to find his body where it was when he lay 
down. His friends tell him that he has not been 
absent from his hut. But he remembers very 
distinctly all these things which he performed in 
his dream. Who was it, then, that visited his 
relative, that stood upon the bank of the river, 
that rode upon the horses, while his body Jay 
here upon the ground? Again he sleeps ; and 
this time in his sleep others visit him ; the wife 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 135 

of his bosom stands by his bedside ; the warrior 
whom he has longed to meet in battle bends over 
him to take his scalp. He awakes ; there is no 
sign that these persons have been present in 
body ; others who have been awake in the same 
room while he has been asleep have seen no such 
visitors. Now what conception arises from all 
these experiences? The conception, says Mr. 
Spencer, that man has another ego, a something 
inside him which we call his spirit, which is in- 
dependent of his body, which wanders about, 
makes visits upon friends, fights battles with 
enemies, joins in the chase and the war dance, 
while this outward ego is asleep on the floor. 

It is but a step from this to the belief that the 
spirits of men, being thus independent of their 
bodies, live after their bodies have perished. 
And this belief is further assisted by experiences 
of the same kind. The savage lies down to 
sleep, and in his sleep he is visited by the ghost 
of his departed father, who stands by his bedside 
and gives him instructions about the hunting- 
grounds or the government of his tribe. As he 
has paid reverence to his father while alive, so 
now he pays worship to the ghost of his father 
dead. He builds a rude altar which the ghost of 
his father may use as a dwelling-place, that he 
may not be obliged to wander about forlorn in the 
uninteresting world of spirits. To this altar the 
worshiper brings meat and drink for his father's 



136 tKElV IVINE SKINS 

ghost. Here he pours wine upon the ground, so 
that the ghost of his father, when thirsty, may 
come and drink. Here he burns meat upon the 
altar, that the smell may arise and satisfy the 
ethereal hunger of his father's ghost. Thus 
begin the first rude rites of sacrifice and worship. 
Around the father's grave, or the altar erected as 
the home of his departed spirit, the brothers and 
sisters meet. Here family quarrels are made up, 
differences are adjusted, and worship becomes a 
social instead of a personal function. 

In many tribes religion never passes beyond 
the form of ancestor worship ; and in China to- 
day we find ancestor worship coupled with other 
forms of religion. But in prosperous tribes some 
great king will sometime appear, who unites the 
whole tribe into one great family. When this 
king dies, the members of the whole tribe unite 
in building a house for his spirit, and in offering 
sacrifices to it. Thus the idea of a deity becomes 
enlarged. Each family no longer has its own 
protecting spirit, or at least no longer its own 
alone ; the whole tribe now has one in common. 
When the tribe goes into battle it goes in with 
the name of its great king upon its lips ; his spirit 
rides at the head of the army. If the tribe comes 
out of battle victorious, it gathers again about the 
altar ; additional rites and ceremonies are em- 
ployed to express the common thanks to the 
protecting spirit. The conquered tribes conclude 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 137 

that the spirit whom they worshiped when they 
went into battle is not so great as that which the 
victors worshiped, since he evidently could not 
deliver his children. So they are prepared to 
abandon him and worship the great spirit of the 
victorious tribe. Thus religion grows until we 
come to the reflecting stages of human life. 

What shall we say of Mr. Spencer's account of 
the origin of religion and its bearing upon the 
Christian faith? I am going to say that it makes 
no sort of difference to the Christian faith 
whether this is the true theory of the origin of 
religion or not. Whether it is the true theory or 
not, nobody, for that matter, will ever know. But 
whether it is or not makes no difference to the 
Christian religion. Granting that it is, every 
process of evolution must be judged by its out- 
come and not by its beginning. If the idea of 
God and the belief in immortality began in this 
way, that in no degree invalidates the ideas of 
God and immortality which we hold to-day. As 
man is what he is irrespective of where he came 
from, so our belief in God and in a spiritual world 
rests now upon the logical and necessary founda- 
tions upon which it now stands, no matter what 
it once rested upon. 

In addition to these doctrines developed by 
Mr. Spencer himself, his philosophy contains 
implications of quite different and superior impor- 
tance. These implications are drawn out in the 



138 tKElV WINE SKINS 

various works of Mr. Spencer's great American 
disciple, Mr. John Fiske. Their bearing is upon 
the fundamentals of religion — upon those founda- 
tions upon which all religion rests, rather than 
upon the Christian religion exclusively. Never- 
theless, whatever affects the foundations affects 
the superstructure ; so, then, I will call your 
attention to one or two of these implications. 

The first is this : Mr. Spencer, in what seems 
to his disciples a stroke of genius, defines life as 
an adjustment of inner relations to outer rela- 
tions. A tree is alive because it can adjust itself 
to conditions of earth and atmosphere. A dog is 
more alive because in addition to these he can 
adjust himself to conditions of motion and place. 
If you kick him he will resent it, or at any rate 
he will move — toward you or from you ; that is, 
his inner relations are capable of becoming ad- 
justed to a new outer relation. Each advance in 
life, from plant to animal, from animal to man, 
from primitive man to modern man, is marked by 
the greater complexity of the outer relation to 
which the inner life can adjust itself. So far, 
very good and plain. Now, says Mr. Fiske, in 
his " Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," religion 
is an adjustment of man to his environment — the 
last and highest adjustment that man has made 
to that which is highest in his environment, 
namely, to his fellows as moral and spiritual 
beings, and God — in other words, to the spiritual 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 139 

world. Now, continues he in his little book, 
"Through Nature to God," every advance that 
has been made through all the past in the adjust- 
ment of inner life to environment has been an 
adjustment to something in the environment that 
was really there. For instance, when the eye 
developed, and the fish, instead of merely feeling 
around, began to swim by sight, he thus adjusted 
himself to a new environment, or to a new ele- 
ment in his environment. But this adjustment was 
not to things that he imagined in his environment, 
but to things that were actual in it. This has been 
true of every advance in life, every new adjust- 
ment. But now to suppose that God, to whom man 
had at last adjusted his relations, and the adjust- 
ment of his relations to whom constitutes religion, 
is not really there, but is only imagined ; or that 
he is not really what man thinks him to be ; or in 
other words, to suppose that the spiritual life 
which has been developed in man by his adjust- 
ment to the environment of the spiritual world 
has been developed by adjustment to purely im- 
aginary objects — this requires us to believe that 
in this one instance of additional adjustment the 
whole preceding history of man and nature is 
reversed ; a belief which to the scientific and 
philosophical mind is impossible. This is the 
argument for the existence of God of which 
Washington Gladden recently said that it came 
the nearest to a demonstration of all that he had 



140 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

ever seen. It is also the argument of which Mr. 
Fiske says, " This argument, so far as I know, is 
here presented for the first time." So then, if 
Mr. Fiske is right about this, and if his argument 
is good for anything, the doctrine of Mr. Spencer 
has done one service for religion. 

The second religious implication of the Spen- 
cerian philosophy to which I said I would call 
your attention is as follows : According to Mr. 
Spencer religion has come into the world by the 
same process of evolution which rules throughout 
the universe. Not only so, but it is the last and 
highest manifestation of the working of this pro- 
cess of evolution. Now it is an accepted principle 
that from nothing nothing comes ; that you can- 
not get out of anything anything more than there 
is in it ; and that whatever has come out of the 
process of evolution in its later stages must have 
been present in some sense and in some manner 
from the first. Therefore, not only is religion a 
thing which the whole process of evolution, with 
its inconceivably vast periods of time and its 
equally inconceivably vast reaches through space, 
has been laboring to produce ; but it is also 
something which in some way is inseparably con- 
nected with the sum total of existence, and has 
been in essence present at every stage of devel- 
opment. In other words, it is no manufactured 
article ; nor is it an afterthought of God. It is 
a principle embodied in the inmost meaning of 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 141 

the universe, and like all other principles so em- 
bodied working itself into human life when the 
proper time came. Religion, in other words, is 
one of the final products of human evolution ; but 
human evolution is but a part of that vastly 
greater process of evolution by which the world 
was made, the suns and planets took their places, 
and all things which do now appear came to be 
where and what they are. Therefore, religion is 
that goal toward which, from out all past time and 
in all place, " the whole creation moves." Evo- 
lution in a world is the method of the universal 
life ; religion is the final product of evolution ; 
religion therefore is implicit in every step of 
evolution ; realized in human life in the process 
of time it is in its essence eternal — enthroned at 
the heart of the universe itself. 

Students of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the 
trinity (not the popular doctrine, which is a 
curious misunderstanding of the meaning of a 
great truth) will recognize that we have here, in 
Mr. Fiske's scientific reasoning, the same truth 
which is aimed at in the great doctrine of the 
trinity ; the truth namely, that the relation be- 
tween God and someone upon whom his love can 
be exercised and who can return it to him (and 
that constitutes religion, of course,) is not a tem- 
porary relation, coming into existence for the first 
time when the religious history of man began, 
but is inherent, and necessary, and eternal, in 



142 U^EIV WINE SKINS 

the nature of God. So then Mr. Spencer, if he 
only understood himself as well as some of the 
rest of us understand him, would be a good 
trinitarian. 

There is one other element in Christian faith 
to the bearing of which upon the Spencerian 
philosophy I must call your attention. That is 
the belief in revelation. It need hardly be said 
that the belief in revelation is fundamental to 
religion. If God is what Epicurus said he was — 
if he takes no interest in men — if God has not 
spoken, how can there be any religion? There 
is one sort of revelation in which Mr. Spencer, or 
any strict adherent of the evolutionary school, 
will find it difficult or impossible to believe. That 
is what may be called the hypodermic sort. If 
revelation must be the injection of particular 
pieces of truth into the mind of man from some- 
where without, by miraculous processes which 
can neither be pictured by the imagination nor 
analyzed and understood by the reason, then 
upon the evolutionary view of the world there is 
no revelation. Most of the evolutionary writers, 
including notably Spencer himself, not being fur- 
nished by the religious thinkers of their time with 
any other conception of revelation, nor aware 
that there could be any other, have frankly 
rejected the idea of revelation altogether. I 
remember to have read a letter of Darwin in 
which he confessed to someone who had asked 



HERBERT SPENCER AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 143 

his opinion, that, sorry as he was to say it, he 
did not think there had ever been a revelation. 
But there is a conception of God, fast taking 
hold upon the modern world, which renders all 
such melancholy conclusions unnecessary ; which 
in fact makes the doctrine of evolution a tremen- 
dous contributor, instead of a stumbling-block, 
to a belief in revelation. What idea of God was 
it that made Spencer and Darwin feel that they 
must draw from their evolutionary views such 
conclusions about revelation? It was the idea 
that if God existed at all he must be somewhere 
outside the universe, and if he revealed himself 
at all he must reveal himself by breaking into the 
universe at some point in time and place. But 
the more they looked for the time and the place 
in which he had thus broken into the universe 
from outside, the less they could find them. But 
what do we say of God to-day? That he stands 
not outside but within his universe. He is not 
the infinite carpenter and joiner, who at some 
particular moment in time puts together his 
worlds and makes the things that shall inhabit 
them ; he is the infinite spirit unfolding within 
and through the universe. We have then but to 
join this idea of the immanence of God with the 
evolutionary view of the world, and we have the 
sublimest and the solidest conception of revela- 
tion that could be. Revelation becomes not a 
series of strange incidents in which God has 



H4 WEJV WINE SKINS 

mysteriously injected certain truths into the hu- 
man mind ; but the whole vast process of evolu- 
tion by which God has been unfolding his own 
life and exhibiting his own purposes and incarnat- 
ing his own spirit, before the eyes and within the 
souls of men. Revelation is not some incident or 
episode, however important, in the evolutionary 
process, nor any series of such incidents or 
episodes, however imposing ; but the whole evo- 
lutionary process itself is the revelation of God. 
Inspiration is not the action upon man of a force 
which dwells outside him, as the match upon the 
gunpowder or the torch upon the haystack ; it is 
the coming to consciousness of the spirit of God 
within man. To this grand, continuous process, 
or revelation, nothing, in any time, in any place, 
is foreign ; all things speak of God. To this idea 
of revelation the doctrine of evolution drives us, 
and that which at first seemed to imperil the 
belief in revelation, makes possible and imperative 
a far vaster and more noble conception of revela- 
tion. If, in the contemplation of the areas which 
it thus opens to our view, some of our own ideas 
seem to dwindle and some of our pet notions about 
God's ways to fade, it is only that God may be 
larger to us, more present in every part of his 
world, more active in behalf of all his children ; 
more universally the author of all being, the 
source and revealer of all truth, and the father of 
all spirits. 



The Problem of Biblical Inter- 
pretation 



VI 

ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL 
METHOD IN STUDYING THE 
OLD TESTAMENT 

BY 

REV. A. T. SALLEY, D. D., 

Pastor of the Main Street Free Baptist Church ; 

Instructor in Church History, Cobb Divinity School, 

Lewiston, Maine 



Advantages of the Historical Method in 
Studying the Old Testament 



THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN BIBLICAL STUDY 

The Bible is the great repository of religious 
truth, at least to the Christian Church. The 
oracles of God are in it. The foundation prin- 
ciples of moral and religious life are there. But 
it is a book. All its contents are in written form. 
It has all the varied characteristics of literature. 
The great question is how to interpret it, how to 
unfold that content. We have a shell of words 
and a kernel of truth ; now, how shall we pierce 
this shell and secure the kernel? What are our 
tools? Simply the methods of interpretation 
which we adopt. With these we translate the 
words of Scripture back into the ideas which each 
writer sought to express. In the past, and in 
some quarters even now, the opinion has pre- 
vailed that the Scriptures are a form of writing so 
unique that ordinary methods of literary criticism 
and interpretation are not applicable to them. 
Hence the mysticism of Origen and his school. 
Hence the many false principles of interpretation 
which from time to time have been laid down. 



150 ${EW WINE SKINS 

Many others, while they do not adopt so radi- 
cal a view as the above, cannot seem to free 
themselves from the impression that the Bible is 
a peculiar book and cannot be studied as other 
books are studied. This is certainly an error, a 
form of superstition, which puts the man who 
approaches the Scriptures for purposes of inves- 
tigation in a wrong mental attitude. He is ham- 
pered at the start. 

The true view is doubtless this : The Bible is 
a body of literature, subject to all the laws of 
written language, to be studied and understood in 
harmony with these laws. A letter of Paul or 
of James is a literary phenomenon of the same 
kind as a letter of George Washington or Abra- 
ham Lincoln. We must get at the meaning of 
each in precisely the same way. The method 
which will give us the thought of one will give us 
the thought of the other. A religious truth is 
expressed in the same way as a scientific or his- 
toric truth. There is nothing peculiar about its 
literary form. 

Two methods, always inseparable, are made 
use of in unfolding the meaning of any piece of 
literature, viz., the exegetical, which lies at the 
base of all interpretation and consists of the 
explanation of language according to its laws, 
and the historical method, which explains a book 
or piece of literature in the light of the historical 
circumstances in the midst of which it was pro- 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 151 

duced and which colored its thought, determined 
its form, and. made it what it is, poetry or prose, 
history or prophecy. 

It is not too much to say that the historical 
method includes the exegetical with an emphasis 
upon the historical situation. There are few 
passages in the Bible to which we could not apply 
this method if we had the data. As things are, 
only a little of the Bible can be clearly under- 
stood without an application of its principles ; 
for each book, and each part of a book, was 
called out by some special circumstances and had 
its first application to men of the author's own 
day. Even such passages as the fifty-third chap- 
ter of Isaiah and Psalm no, where the sweep into 
the future is so wide, including whole millen- 
niums, were primarily for the author's contem- 
poraries. 

The purest Gospel, that which contains the 
great fundamental principles of all moral life with 
the least local coloring, are the sayings of Jesus 
Christ; but these were largely occasioned by 
definite conditions and circumstances in the daily 
life of Jesus or that of his nation, and were first 
spoken to the people who stood before him. We 
know of no addresses by our Lord which did not 
have a first application to some person or thing in 
Christ's own day. We may be helped in our 
thinking by putting the case before us in this 
manner: Jesus Christ sat on the slopes of 



152 f^EW WINE SKINS 

Hattin in the presence of a great multitude. As 
soon as they were quiet, he began to address 
them, and uttered the wonderful Sermon on the 
Mount. Before him were peasants and towns- 
people, ignorant and learned, most of them sim- 
ple people, who knew nothing whatever of rules 
of interpretation, excepting those which all men 
instinctively use. 

Can we for a moment suppose that he spoke so 
that none but those versed in certain special rules 
of hermeneutics could understand him? He ex- 
pected his hearers to apply to his language the 
same rules which they were accustomed to apply 
to home conversation, street talk, or synagogue 
addresses. 

When he talked to the Samaritan woman, he 
used language which could be easily and readily 
understood in any Samaritan home. But when 
he spoke to the crowds of Hattin and to the 
woman of Samaria, he spoke to us of this dis- 
tant age, and certainly we must understand his 
words as they understood them ; these sayings 
have suffered no mysterious change in trans- 
mission. 

We might cite the epistles, for they illustrate 
the two facts that they, like all other sacred writ- 
ings, have a background of history and are the 
product of a literary style only to be understood 
by a careful study of the epoch out of which 
they sprang. 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 153 

Old and New Testament alike present the 
same phenomena, and it would be time wasted to 
interpret them, were it not that a lingering super- 
stition exists that the language of the Bible is in 
some way different from ordinary language, and 
therefore ordinary methods of study are not 
applicable to it. 

THE VALUE OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE 
STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 

This value must be learned by an application 
of the method to particular passages of the Old 
Testament. The method is of use in under- 
standing and explaining both entire books and 
single passages, poems, and individual phrases or 
words. 

THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH 

Of the books of the Old Testament Jeremiah 
will serve as an illustration of the "historical 
method." The book of Jeremiah is a web of 
narratives, historical allusions, addresses, and 
letters, so inwrought and interwoven that an 
understanding of the prophetical part depends on 
a knowledge of the historical situation, and the 
historical situation is extremely intricate. Here 
are a few of the things that must be known before 
the book will yield all its secrets. Jeremiah be- 
gins his ministry in the thirteenth year of Josiah, 
king of Judah, and prophesied through the eigh- 
teen remaining years of Josiah, and the reigns 
of Jehoahaz, three months; Jehoiakim, eleven 



154 tKEIV WINE SKINS 

years ; Jehoakin, three months ; and Zedekiah, 
eleven years. Judah was tributary to Assyria. 
Two years after the death of Josiah, Nineveh 
fell, and Assyria passed away, and Babylonia — 
known, also, as the Chaldean empire — took its 
place. For a few years Palestine was in the 
power of Egypt. Then it passed under the sov- 
ereignty of Babylon, remaining subject and tribu- 
tary until the final overthrow of the Jewish 
state, 587 B. C. 

During all this time Jeremiah was the prophet 
of God and counselor of the Jewish kings. He 
was intimately connected with the whole course 
of Judah's history during these years. A few 
references will show how close was his relation 
to secular as well as religious affairs. Allusion is 
made to Josiah and to the backslidings of Israel 
in his day (Jer. 3:6); to the "evil from the 
north, and a great destruction" which is immi- 
nent (4: 6); to "the sound of the trumpet and 
the alarm of war" (4: 19); to the devastation 
of the whole land of Judah (4 : 20); to the tragic 
death of Josiah (22 : 10) ; and to the captivity of 
Jehoahaz, which was to be lifelong (22 : 11, 12); 
to Babylon and the transportation thither of the 
Jews (20: 1-6); to Nebuchadnezzar (24: 1), the 
Chaldeans (24: 5), and to more than eighteen 
contemporary peoples (25: 19-26); to the Rech- 
abites (35: 2-19), and to the residence of the 
Jews in Egypt (chap. 44). 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 155 

To take away the historical element is to take 
away almost the whole book, and to obscure the 
historical situation is to mystify almost every 
line of Jeremiah's writings. Even those portions 
which seem to be pure prophesying were drawn 
out by certain moral conditions which then char- 
acterized the nation and which can be discovered 
only by careful investigation. 

Perhaps we can best see how much is involved 
in making a rigid application of our principle to 
this book by stating the requirements in outline. 
We must know, (i) the moral and political con- 
ditions of Israel at this time ; (2) the relation of 
Assyria to Judah ; (3) the relation of Assyria to 
Babylon ; (4) the relation of Babylon to Judah ; 
(5) Judah's relation to Egypt; (6) the condition 
of Jewish captives in Babylon ; (7) Jeremiah's 
relation to the successive kings of Judah ; (8) Eze- 
kiel's work in Babylon ; (9) parts of the books of 
2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, the Prophecy of Eze- 
kiel, and perhaps, also, some of the Psalms. All 
these are the side-lights which pour a bright illu- 
mination over every word and sentence, purpose 
and act of the book, and without which it cannot 
be understood. 

PSALM 137 

Of course what is true of whole books is true 
of shorter compositions like the Psalms. Psalm 
137 may serve as an illustration of the shorter 
yet entire compositions. This Psalm falls into 



156 ${EW IVINE SKINS 

two parts as far as our purpose is concerned, 
verses 1-6 and 7-9. Both sections are utterly- 
meaningless apart from the historical situation. 
In the light which the author's condition throws 
upon it, the whole is luminous with beauty and 
sentiment. The writer is one of the many Jew- 
ish captives in a foreign land. His home is be- 
hind him, his friends are scattered, and his nation 
is destroyed ; but more deeply loved and missed 
than any is Jerusalem, the holy city, David's 
city and the dwelling-place of God. The sound 
of her temple choirs no longer reaches his ears 
and thrills his soul. His vision is not gladdened 
by the sight of her priests and altar fires, nor his 
senses regaled with the odor of holy incense. 
But more than all, unholy feet tread her holy soil 
and defile her sacred places. Men of strange 
tongue and alien manners fill the courts of her 
temple, live in the homes once occupied by the 
governors, priests, and prophets of God's chosen 
nation and rule in the places of her power. 
They pass by the graves of her mighty honored 
dead with no thought of their great history. 
They curse and heap derision upon the holy 
name of the covenant God. Overwhelmed with 
sorrow and shame, our author sits down on the 
bank of a foreign river to weep, but his thought- 
less captors intrude upon his grief and mockingly 
say, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." 
Shocked at the heartless request, with true 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 157 

Jewish pride he cries out, "How can we sing 
Jehovah's song in a strange land? " and then 
utters an awful imprecation that, if he should so 
far forget the honor due to Jehovah as to sing 
one of his temple songs for the amusement of 
profane ears, God would paralyze both hands 
and tongue. They are words of sacred praise, 
they shall not be sung to the sport of a pagan 
and ribald crowd. 

The second part marks a sudden turn in the 
thoughts and feelings of the writer, and requires 
separate treatment. Cruel and godless as were 
the authors of his country's ruin, there is a 
people at the very thought of whom all the 
natural prejudice and inherited hate of his Jewish 
nature are kindled into intensest action. Did not 
Edom, their old enemy, he who should have been 
a brother and have helped them when the North 
poured out its flood of soldiery upon their land, 
stand on the heights which overlook the holy 
city, mingle freely and friendly with the hostile 
soldiers, encourage the besiegers, and say in their 
councils of war, when the enemy were discussing 
the fate of the city so soon to be theirs, " Raze 
it! Raze it! even to the foundations thereof!" 
What Jew could think of that awful day without 
having all the resentment of his nature kindled 
into a roaring flame? The guilt of Edom swells 
out into proportions that reach up to the very 
throne of that God whose wrath and condemna- 



158 V^EJV WINE SKINS 

tion our author so bitterly invokes. "Remember, 
O Jehovah, against Edom, the day of Jerusalem. " 
Then his thought comes back to Babylon, the 
author of his country's ruin, and he searches his 
native tongue for words strong enough to frame 
his imprecations against her and to paint his 
frightful pictures of an avenging judgment. 

How can a man of God conceive or utter such 
inhuman sentiments? Men used to resort to all 
sorts of theological arguments to justify them, 
and in so doing they conjured up a theology more 
hideous than the sentiments to be explained. 
But here our historical method helps us. We are 
to judge this outburst of hatred by the spirit and 
teachings of the age. Men speak and act accord- 
ing to the moral standards of their times. We 
expect that. We interpret their sayings by that 
principle. A few facts must be kept in mind : 
(i) That the law of brotherhood as a world-wide 
principle was unknown in our author's day ; (2) 
that heathen nations were not, in the eyes of the 
Jews, children of God and had no claim to kindly 
or merciful treatment; (3) that to cheat, enslave, 
or kill heathen people was rather meritorious 
than otherwise. 

We shall be helped by going back into that 
general period in which our Psalm was written, 
discovering how other Jews felt toward foreign 
nations. The following is not exceptional : 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 159 

" Do not I hate them that hate thee? [and all 
heathen were supposed to hate God] I hate them 
with perfect hatred : I count them my enemies." 
Ps. 139: 21, 22. 

We could hardly speak of the heathen that 
way to-day. Here is a sentiment from the book 
of Deuteronomy (14: 21): "Ye shall not eat of 
anything that dieth of itself: thou mayest give it 
unto the stranger that is within thy gates, that he 
may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto a for- 
eigner." Judged by our standards, this would 
be rather unbrotherly treatment, but it would be 
totally unjust to carry back our 20th century 
standards by which to judge the men of those 
early days ! 

Here again from Deuteronomy (23: 3,6) : "An 
Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the 
assembly of the Lord ; even to the tenth genera- 
tion shall none belonging to them enter into the 
assembly of the Lord forever. . . . Thou shalt not 
seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days 
forever." 

Here is still another: "When thou drawest 
nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim 
peace unto it, and if it will make no peace with 
thee, but will make war against thee, then thou 
shalt besiege it, and when Jehovah thy Lord deliv- 
ered it into thy hand, thou shalt smite every 
male thereof with the edge of the sword, but 
the women and the little ones and the cattle and 



160 ${EW WINE SKINS 

all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, 
thou shalt take to thyself [the women and the 
little ones for slaves]; and thou shalt eat the 
spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God 
hath given thee. Thus shalt thou do unto all the 
cities which are very far off from thee, which are 
not of the cities of these nations. But of the 
cities of these people, which the Lord thy God 
doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save 
alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt 
utterly destroy them ; namely, the Hittites, and 
the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, 
the Hivites, and the Jebusites ; as the Lord thy 
God hath commanded thee." (Deut. 20: 10, 12- 
17.) Yet to save such peoples as these, men and 
women all over Christendom are now asked by 
God to lay down their lives. 

Second Sam. 12: 31 also furnishes us a passage 
pertinent to our purpose : " And he brought forth 
the people that were therein, and put them under 
saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes 
of iron, and made them pass through the brick 
kiln : and thus did he do unto all the cities of the 
children of Ammon. So David and all the people 
returned unto Jerusalem." 

What are we to say of all these expressions of 
unbrotherly regard in the days of long ago? 
Simply this: the Jews were taught to believe, 
and in turn taught their children, that their 
heathen neighbors were under the curse of God, 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 161 

a reprobate brood whom it was their right to 
cheat, enslave, or destroy as they might wish, 
and whom God would soon destroy. Only now 
and then a prophet was lifted to a higher plane, 
and from that height prophesied of a universal 
brotherhood and of a universal kingdom. Out of 
these narrow views our author spoke. He was 
but an exponent of his times, voicing a theology 
which Jesus Christ banished from off the face of 
the earth ; but he spoke as well as he knew, and 
is not to be condemned or even criticised. 

We are not at all capable of judging either the 
acts or words of a man until we have become 
familiar with his environment, the moral stand- 
ards of his age, the social customs, the political 
institutions, the literature and literary models, 
and all else which can influence his conduct or 
shape his words : and these things are to be dis- 
covered only by the aid of the historical method. 

SINGLE WORDS AND PHRASES 

But our method is as applicable to single words 
and phrases as to songs, psalms, or books. A 
few illustrations must suffice. Our first shall be 
from Ps. 1:4: "like the chaff which the wind 
driveth away." This phrase seems perfectly 
simple and in need of no illumination. And yet 
our method gives a new vividness to an expres- 
sion even so transparent as this. A simple cus- 
tom of the times does this helpful work for us. 



162 d^EW WWE SKINS 

It was the habit of the people to prepare their 
threshing floors upon heights of ground exposed 
to the full force of the wind, so that when win- 
nowing day came, and the farmer took his shovel 
(" his fan") and tossed the threshed grain high 
in the air, the wind would catch the light chaff 
and whirl it down the hillside — fit symbol of the 
destruction of the wicked! — while the heavy 
wheat would fall back onto the floor, cleansed and 
ready for garnering. 

Another example may be found in Josh. 15 : 15 : 
" And he went up thence against the inhabitants 
of Debir : now the name of Debir before time 
was Kirjath-sepher." This verse seems to be 
perfectly clear as it stands. What simpler sen- 
tence or clearer statement is needed ? But see, 
our method throws a new light upon the passage. 
Kirjath-sepher means "city of books," or a 
library city; while Debir, in the only place 
where it is not used of the name of a town, means 
" holy of holies," or sanctuary; that is, the holy 
part of a temple. 

Now, modern investigations have discovered 
that the ancient temples were often the libraries 
of the ancient world. Prof. Hilprecht of the 
University of Pennsylvania has recently discov- 
ered a very ancient library in the old temple at 
Nippur. What far-reaching meaning that fact 
gives to this simple statement! When the chil- 
dren of Israel invaded Palestine they warred not 



ADVANTAGES OF THE HISTORICAL METHOD 163 

against a nation of savages, but against an en- 
lightened people, a people with literature and 
libraries; and when Joshua attacked Debir he 
was invading a center of learning, a city which 
was at that time, or had been, the seat of literary 
activity. In the light of some such facts as these, 
we must revise all our old theories about Pales- 
tine and the condition of people at the time of the 
Israelitish invasion. 

Innumerable other examples might be cited, but 
these are enough to vindicate this method of inter- 
pretation. It is not too much to hope that in the 
near future this instrument of investigation will 
be in the hands of every Bible student. Why 
should we be afraid of the light? In the light we 
see light. Investigation and historical criticism 
can alone put us in possession of those facts 
which are necessary to a full explanation of the 
Bible. If we could see the standards and know 
the customs and feel the prejudices and currents 
of thought belonging to any particular age, we 
would find its theology intelligible and ourselves 
in sympathy with the makers and holders of that 
system of thought, however false we may pro- 
nounce it. Every sentence, as, "I will take the 
cup of salvation, " "I will lift up mine eyes to 
the mountains,' ' " I have trodden the winepress 
alone," each image and picture, 'Mike apples of 
gold in network of silver," "the bowl of the cup 
of staggering," and each doctrinal statement 



164 O^EIV IVINE SKINS 

owes its phrasing and much of its force and color- 
ing to the author's environment. " He [God] 
breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my 
wounds without cause." How dare mortal man 
thus blaspheme God? But one has only to go 
and look upon Job sitting in ashes and filth, dis- 
eased, forsaken, subjected to unjust suspicion and 
goaded on by stupid companions, to understand 
it all. 

The trend in Bible study is toward a more crit- 
ical investigation into the environment of the 
books. The mists are rolling away, the sun is 
shining clearer, we are understanding the Bible 
better. While invoking the Spirit's aid to the 
fullest, let us accept all other God-given aids. 



VII 

THE HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE NEW 
TESTAMENT EVANGEL 

BY 
ALFRED WILLIAMS ANTHONY, A. M. 

Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Criticism, 
Cobb Divinity School. 



The Historical Setting of the New 
Testament Evangel 



Jesus Christ did not bring civilization into the 
world. While accelerating culture, he did not 
originate it. He joined with forces and tenden- 
cies already in existence. 

CIVILIZATION BEFORE CHRIST 

There were civilizations before our Christian 
era began. In China three thousand years be- 
fore Christ, houses were built, fire was used, iron 
was discovered, and the plow invented; but the 
Christ came not to the teeming millions of China. 
Confucius, five centuries before his advent, was 
the acme of Chinese thought. But the Chinese 
could not then, nor since, serve the world. De- 
void of imagination and indisposed to philosophy, 
with a monosyllabic and uninflected language 
which cannot express abstract or poetical ideas, 
they are constitutionally unable to speak to the 
universal heart of man, and never have influ- 
enced people outside of their own land. 

Two thousand years before Christ there had 
settled in India a people manifesting many of the 
elements of modern civilization, whose religion 
and life have left in the Vedas a literature in 



168 V^EIV IVINE SKINS 

which scholars find not only beauty of thought 
and expression, but also knowledge concerning 
the origins of men and institutions. But Jesus 
is not described in the Vedas. He came not 
then. Nor did he come later in that Gautama 
who founded Buddhism. The religion of India, 
running into mysticism and asceticism and thence 
into emphatic individualism, where personal con- 
duct became the sole basis of salvation, had no 
message for the world. There the gods are 
parts of nature, or celestial phenomena, more or 
less personified; and the thought of brotherhood 
is unknown. 

That Egypt, whither, by strange providences 
unto his fathers, Moses had been led for instruc- 
tion "in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," was 
a land of mechanical skill, artistic culture, science, 
and literature more than a thousand years before 
the Christmas advent at Bethlehem, and yet the 
Christ came not to Egypt, populous, cultured as 
it was. 

Babylon and Nineveh, from thirty to fifty cen- 
turies before Jesus came, were the capitols of 
mighty kings, with puissant armies and swarm- 
ing populations, among whom religion and science 
were cultivated. The attainments of the early 
Babylonians, in mathematics and astronomy, 
as much as five thousand years before Christ, 
were far beyond those of the Egyptians. They 
divided the year into twelve months, and arrived 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 169 

at the signs of the zodiac. The week they fixed 
at seven days by the course of the moon. They 
divided the day into twelve hours and the hour 
into sixty minutes. They invented weights and 
measures; they used the potter's wheel ; they 
manufactured delicate fabrics, linen, muslin, and 
silk. The libraries of Nineveh, now coming to 
light, astonish the world. But Jesus came not to 
the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris. 

Phoenicia, the little strip of land lying north- 
ward of Palestine along the Mediterranean Sea, 
became the seat of a powerful people, at the cul- 
mination of their prosperity and influence under 
King Hiram, a contemporary of Solomon. The 
Phoenicians were noted for their glass, their pur- 
ple dyes, their improved alphabet, and for their 
knowledge of the art of writing. In mining and 
in casting metals, in the manufacture of cloth, in 
architecture and in other arts they were not less 
proficient. But as a sea-faring people they are 
best known. Their ships scoured the Mediter- 
ranean, and pushed far out beyond the Straits of 
Gibraltar. They first gave trade and commerce 
to men, furnishing a means of transportation and 
communication. They, too, were the first colon- 
izers. Other nations had absorbed peoples, draw- 
ing them in and settling them among themselves 
as subjects and captives. The Phoenicians sent 
out their people and made settlements in Cyprus 
and Crete, on the islands of the ^Egean Sea, in 



170 V{EW WME SKINS 

southern Spain and in northern Africa. On the 
latter coast, planted by Phoenicia, great Carthage 
sprang up, which later vied so strenuously with 
Rome for the mastery of the sea and the world. 
But, though the spirit of brotherhood and social 
extension began to be manifest amongst men, the 
Christ came not. 

All the years of the Hebrew training preceded : 
the patriarchal age, the period of the prophets, 
the era of the judges, and the reign of kings, 
when under David and Solomon the nation at- 
tained its greatest unity, splendor, and strength. 
Then followed division, disruption, separation, 
weakness, captivity. The expectation of the 
Messiah was a hope unrealized; he came not. 

Then a nation to the south and east arose — Per- 
sia. Under Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius, Baby- 
lon was conquered, the Jews liberated, Assyria 
absorbed, Egypt on the south and Macedonia on 
the north conquered. Darius ruled over at least 
eighty millions of people. His empire stretched 
from east to west for a distance of at least three 
thousand miles, and varied between five hundred 
and fifteen hundred miles in width. The Persians 
developed forms of government anticipating the 
later achievements of the Romans. Their em- 
pire was divided into satrapies, each ruled over 
by a satrap, with under-orTicials; taxes were 
levied and gathered ; a system of coinage was 
introduced, vast military roads were constructed 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 171 

and communication by land rendered possible, as 
the Phoenicians had made it possible by sea. But 
lesus came not yet. 

Greece flourished with all her glory and re- 
nown, — with her Homer and Xenophon ; with 
her Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis ; with 
her Lycurgus, Solon, Pausanias, Themistocles, 
and Pericles; with her Socrates, Plato, and Aris- 
totle ; with her Phidias and Praxiteles; but the 
Christ came not to Athens. 

Philip of Macedon and Alexander stalked across 
the earth spreading the Greek language and 
Greek thought from the Adriatic on the west to 
the Indus on the east. All these wars and con- 
quests were bringing more nearly together in one 
family the race of men to whom Egypt and 
Babylon had given culture, Phoenicia intercourse 
by sea, Persia political unity, and Palestine a 
monotheistic religion. 

But in the West the greatest power of all was 
to arise. On the Tiber, nursed as at the dugs of 
a wolf, little by little grew the coming conqueror. 
Civil liberty was spoken of, citizenship became a 
new and vivid conception, the rights of the com- 
mon people were at least in part recognized. 
Scipio, Pompey, Caesar, Augustus, are names 
which conjure up this past. Rome prevailed 
over the then known world, east and west, north 
and south. Military officers, governors, tax col- 
lectors, philosophers, and pleasure seekers jour- 



172 tKElV WINE SKINS 

neyed over highways, costly and enduring, which 
bound the distant parts with the imperial city into 
one social fabric. 

Now at length the Christ comes; but he comes 
not to Rome. He is not a part of the advancing 
tide of civilization, save as the moon is a part of 
the ebb and flow of the tide upon the seashore. 
In the Roman empire, under its domination, yet 
he is not of it. Rome's military arm at length 
drives the nails through his quivering flesh! 

He comes at that time. He does not wait for 
the sympathy and support of a Constantine, nor 
for the zeal and enthusiasm of a Mahomet, nor 
for the great generalship and indomitable energy 
of a Charlemagne. He waited not for Columbus 
nor Napoleon ; for Wickliffe, Huss, nor Savona- 
rola; for neither Luther nor Calvin, neither the 
Puritans nor Roger Williams. 

He was in no sense the flower of civilization. 
Nations did not make him. He came to a people 
distinctively slow and unprogressive, devoid of 
art, without inventive genius, not given at that 
time to trade or commerce, neither adventurers 
on the sea nor explorers on the land, nor yet 
possessing the genius of organization and govern- 
ment. 

To understand his uniqueness and his marvel- 
ous influence in the world's history, one must 
study the history of other religions and other 
civilizations. 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 173 

THE LAND TO WHICH HE CAME. 

He did not enter upon life in a court or a palace. 
Born in an obscure corner of an obscure stable in 
the little south town of Bethlehem, he afterward 
passed his youth in an inconspicuous village 
among the hills of Galilee, and never went out 
of a territory smaller than a single county in the 
State of Maine. When we look for the Saviour 
of the world, we must pass by the great haunts 
of men, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, 
Paris, Berlin, Chicago. If Christ should come to 
Chicago, he would be unlike himself. 

In one way too much stress has been laid upon 
the preparation of the world for his coming. It 
was not a preparation of fitness so much as of 
need. Far fitter times are now. But he was 
not made by his times. He was far greater than 
environment. His message was more than the 
mere phrasing of the underlying thoughts of men. 
He came in harmony with many of the unspoken 
needs of his day, but he was far above and be- 
yond his day. 

There was no holy land before his advent. 
The land shed no glory on him. He made the 
land holy. His people were a thousand years by 
their meridian. He drew no eminence from them. 
There was scarcely an unlikelier people — speak- 
ing from the point of view of worldly power and 
influence — to produce a world reformer than the 
Jews. But he came from them. Wealth, cul- 



174 ViEW WINE SKINS 

ture, aristocratic connections lent no lustre. He 
was the light of the world, because of what he 
was. 

All Palestine, the scene of his activity, is but 
one hundred and forty-four miles in length, from 
Dan to Beersheba, — not a long distance between 
New England cities, even. He did not stride 
over the earth like a Colossus. At the south, its 
widest point, Palestine is ninety miles wide ; at 
Jerusalem it is fifty-five miles wide ; at the south- 
ern end of the Sea of Galilee it is forty miles, and 
at the far north it contracts to but twenty-five 
miles in width. 

All Palestine is but one-fifth the size of the 
State of Maine. The single county of Aroostook 
contains eight hundred square miles more. It is 
two-thirds the size of New Hampshire ; two- 
thirds the size of Vermont ; three-fourths the size 
of Massachusetts ; and just about equal to the 
combined areas of the States of Rhode Island and 
Connecticut. This small territory was the scene 
of Christ's activity. To us it seems like an out- 
of-the-way corner of the earth. It was not quite 
that in his day, and yet it was then far from 
being the centre of action and influence amongst 
men. It did not make him, he made it, famous. 

THE OPPOSITION ENCOUNTERED. 

His message was not heard without opposition. 
Not mere obscurity was to be overcome, but 
active and bitter hostility. We may name five 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 175 

forces which Christianity had to meet and over- 
throw, political, intellectual, social, aesthetic, and 
religious. 

There was the material force of the empire of 
the Caesars, not quiescent and resisting solely by 
its own dead weight, but alarmed and enraged, 
and flinging itself with all its concentrated power 
upon the infant Church. Remember the persecu- 
tions, bloody and bitter, which followed in quick 
succession with the design of totally obliterating 
the message and the message-bearers. Chris- 
tians were charged as having hatred for mankind 
{odium generis humani ', as Tacitus alleges) ; Chris- 
tians were maligned because their modes of wor- 
ship were so unlike pagan modes ; they were the 
subjects of all manner of slanders and calumnies ; 
calamities, pestilences, droughts, wars, tempests, 
and diseases were laid upon the responsibility of 
the Christian religion, because it was averred 
that the gods were incensed at Christian wor- 
ship ; Rome even feared that her own sovereignty 
was plotted against ; and then began the bloody 
work of repression or extermination. Laws 
were enacted against Christians ; decrees issued ; 
fires kindled ; wild beasts fed ; and the proces- 
sion of witnesses — "martyrs" — dragged its 
mournful spectacle across the world's stage, at 
the command of Nero, Domitian, Marcus Antoni- 
nus, Severus, and other emperors. But the mes- 
sage was greater than political power. 



176 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

There was the intellectual force of speculative 
philosophies, acute and persistent. Think of the 
early heresies in all the forms of gnostic specula- 
tion which began even while the Apostle Paul was 
penning his epistles to the churches, and were 
embodied in the persons against whom he utters 
warnings — Hymenaeus, Alexander, Philetus, Her- 
mogenes, Phygellus, Demas, and Diotrephes. 
Then how philosophical heresies multiplied under 
the leadership of such men as Simon Magus, 
Menander, Nicolas, Cerinthus, Valentinus, Basi- 
lides, Arius, Socinus. Through nineteen centu- 
ries sects and schisms have multiplied, down to a 
science which proclaims itself Christian, and 
travesties which profess to be apostolic. 

There was the social force of customs associ- 
ated with every circumstance of human life, and 
twining around all that is best and all that is worst 
in the human heart — its joys and sorrows, its 
licentiousness and its greatness. Manners and 
habits in the family resisted the admonitions of 
the message ; but the message spoke on, prevail- 
ing gradually over parental tyranny, over female 
degradation, over loose marriage and looser 
divorce practices, over corrupt standards of per- 
sonal purity, over cruel and barbarous methods 
of treating slaves and even over slavery itself. 
In business, in industry, in society, in the seclu- 
sion of the schools, in the games and sports of 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 177 

the populace, the influence of Christianity 
swept on. It was greater, more potent than all 
its environment. 

All aesthetic forces stood at first opposed to 
Christianity, and Christianity at first was op- 
posed to them. But the Christian religion took 
art and made it her handmaid, though the subju- 
gation was slow. Before the advent of Christ 
art had no lofty ideals. There was beauty of 
certain forms, sensuous, emotional, but not noble 
and grand. To architecture Christianity com- 
mitted the construction of her temples ; and then 
chiseled stone and groined arch arose, father and 
son working, one generation after another, upon 
the same cathedral, as though building for eter- 
nity. Naitam, king of the Picts, advised his peo- 
ple to become Christians, when he saw that the 
missionaries erected the best building in Britain 
for a church. 

Christianity gave to music and song its most 
exalted themes and its noblest incentives. The 
organ, the chant, the chorus, the paean, the 
dirge, the requiem, the oratorio, the cantata, throb 
and swell through majestic porches and vaulted 
roofs because of Christianity's adoption of music. 

In sculpture, painting, and poetry, also, the 
message of Christ has given the subjects and 
furnished the motives for the world's master- 
pieces; but all these prevailed not easily, not by 
quick and ready reception. Into centuries of 



178 tKElV WINE SKINS 

pagan growth and development had been in- 
wrought other ideals and other conceptions which 
Christianity must displace. The message was 
greater than that which any art of China, India, 
Egypt, or Greece could produce ; it was a message 
of man and God, for eternity. 

Then, too, there was the spiritual force such as 
is always wielded by ancient and established 
superstitions. Idolatry, polytheism, dualism, pan- 
theism, materialism dominated tenaciously the 
minds of men. Demons peopled the air, causing 
sickness and distempers ; fairies and gnomes, 
brownies and sprites, witches and hobgoblins 
dwelt in the dells and ransacked the earth and 
exploited the night; ghosts and spirits, dreams 
and omens, portents and signs held magic sway 
over men, regulating their daily affairs and dis- 
closing the mysteries of the future. With all 
these the message was obliged to contend ; but it 
was greater than they all. It came and pre- 
vailed. 

THE ENVIRONMENT OF THOUGHT AND LITERATURE. 

While potent forces opposed Christianity at the 
outset, yet there were also currents of thoughts 
and forms of expression and even philosophical 
and religious conceptions of which it could avail 
itself by adaptation and assimilation. The Greek 
language, the Greek literature, and even Greek 
philosophical systems made contributions to the 
teachings of Jesus Christ. 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 179 

Jesus spoke undoubtedly both the Aramaic 
dialect of his native land and also the Greek 
speech of men of trade and government in that 
land. His apostles, even more than he, were con- 
trolled, though unconsciously, by Greek modes 
of thought and phrasing. They wrote in Greek, 
transferring more or less closely into Greek idioms 
many conceptions, however Jewish, which they 
wished to express. Their very thinking was 
determined to no small degree by the mould into 
which their thought was cast. We must ap- 
proach the apostles and their Master to-day 
through the medium of this classic tongue, not in 
its pure classic forms, and yet with the aroma of 
the classic vintage still lingering about it. 

Jesus taught as a peripatetic philosopher, jour- 
neying in extreme simplicity from place to place, 
attended by a band of pupils, giving instruction 
by means of the question and answer, the anec- 
dote and story, the parable, the explanation and 
the application. It is a Greek class room, not a 
Jewish, which is depicted on the pages of the 
New Testament. 

Modern theology has been said to show a larger 
influence of the Nicene Creed than of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, while yet more obviously has 
the Nicene Creed caught up into itself the pre- 
vailing spirit and forms and conceptions of Greek 
philosophy than of the Sermon on the Mount. 
Yet Jesus himself was not unaffected by the cul- 



180 vkeiv mm SKINS 

ture of the world which emanated from Athens. 
He adopted none of its dogmas and used none of 
its rhetoric, and yet the atmosphere of its think- 
ing was his also ; the universality of his view 
and the penetrative simplicity of his teaching 
were Grecian. 

Yet far more distinctively was Jesus submerged 
in Jewish thought and feeling. Apart from the 
Old Testament and Talmudic doctrines and Rab- 
binic conceptions his utterances can scarcely be 
understood. His point of view was oriental, not 
occidental. Natural objects, social customs, pop- 
ular notions, are all from the East. 

The doctrines which he emphasized most often 
may be found in germ in the Old Testament — 
the Fatherhood of God, "the Son of man," sin, 
righteousness, salvation, and "the kingdom.' ' 
Jesus came speaking to the Jews and seeking the 
lost sheep of the house of Israel. His terminol- 
ogy and the assumptions which he did not take 
occasion to develop, because already understood, 
issued from Jewish sources. 

One cannot read the New Testament without 
constant reference to the Old, not because "a 
scarlet thread of blood" runs through the Old 
Testament, prefiguring the culminating sacrifice 
of the New, but because the history of the New 
Testament, the quotations of the New Testament, 
the allusions of the New Testament, the imagery 
of the New Testament, and the underlying 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 181 

thoughts and conceptions of the New Testament 
are derived in their elements at least from the 
Old. 

So likewise the literature of the Jews outside 
of the Old Testament, which is known as the 
" apocalyptic literature," has a definite relation 
to the contents of the New Testament, particu- 
larly in those parts which are predictive of the 
destruction of Jerusalem, the end of the world, 
the last judgment, and the coming of the Son of 
man. 

Jesus entered into historic relations with his 
day. For an appreciation of him, an understand- 
ing of his times and his environment is necessary. 
From such an investigation both the amount of 
assimilation from that environment and of posi- 
tive difference with that environment in the per- 
son and work of Jesus become apparent. If 
Jesus be more than his day, then to discover how 
much more he was, one must know well that day. 
Both his adaptation and his individuality are 
involved. 

PERSONALITIES EMPLOYED 

Jesus was the central personality. It was not 
his words, not his works, not his magnetic influ- 
ence that so profoundly moved men, but it was 
he himself. Christianity was more than instruc- 
tion, or doctrine, or catechism, more than a sys- 
tem of truth, philosophical or theological, for 
Christianity preeminently was, and is, Christ. 



182 ViElV WINE SKINS 

The message is in his person. The evangel is 
received not so much by syllogism and statement 
as by contact and contagion. Jesus was pattern 
and example more than teacher or preacher. He 
was himself exemplification of the truth he 
brought rather than exemplifier of truth. To 
know Jesus was to have life everlasting ; to do 
his will was to know his teaching. Discipleship 
consisted in imitation of his life, rather than in 
the repetition of his words. He was the revela- 
tion ; he was the incarnation of God ; he was 
himself the embodiment of the good news brought 
to men. The leaven, hidden in the measure of 
meal, needed simply the power and efficacy of its 
own nature. 

About this central person were gathered at first 
twelve other persons; and then the contagion 
spread. It was not by the dissemination of liter- 
ature, nor by the promulgation of a doctrine, nor 
by the giving of a password ; it was solely by 
the spread of the life. This means by the modi- 
fication and enlargement of personality in the 
disciples. 

We do not know the external, physical charac- 
teristics of Jesus, — his height, weight, com- 
plexion, eyes, hair. Personality, however, does 
not consist in externals. Beauty, stature, form, 
complexion have their values, but the plainest 
people sometimes are the most forceful and influ- 
ential. We cannot see the face of Jesus. All 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 183 

traditions are untrustworthy. The legend of St. 
Veronica is wholly mythical. We can see Christ, 
however, in four distinct types, to use a classi- 
fication employed by Professor Sanday in the new 
Dictionary of the Bible: 

(i) We can see the Christ of the Synoptic 
Gospels ; this is a biographical type, a man of 
action, of compassion, of gentleness, of purity, 
of dignity, of love; (2) we may see the Christ 
of the apostles, a Christ exalted, adored, ad- 
dressed as Lord, recognized as in position and 
glory beside the Father, the Christ more of phil- 
osophy and explanation ; (3) we may see him as 
the Christ of the undivided Church, now the 
Christ who fits into a scheme of salvation, a doc- 
trinal personage with a doctrinal relation to a 
system of truth, whose nature and office, revela- 
tory of the Father, work for man an atonement 
with the Father and a redemption from sin ; this 
is the Christ of Theology ; (4) we may see him 
also in experience, — he then is friend, present 
helper, inspiration, strength, and solace. 

But in whatever form he be seen, he is central 
and supreme. From him issue the radiance and 
glory, the power and efficacy, of the New Testa- 
ment evangel. To know Christianity one must 
know Christ. There are no substitutes ; there 
are no short cuts. Christ is Christianity. There 
is no other religion of personalities. Buddhism 
is not Gautama ; Mohammedanism is not Ma- 



184 WEIV WINE SKINS 

hornet ; Parseeism is not Zoroaster ; but Christi- 
anity is Christ, and Christ is Christianity. 

To personalities Jesus left his religion. The 
only formula, even, which he taught his disciples 
was a prayer, " Our Father, who art in heaven.' ' 
This is not a confession of faith nor a declaration 
of principles, though faith and principles may be 
involved in it. It is rather an act of homage, of 
devotion, of worship. It does not seem, either, 
that this was designed to be a liturgical form of 
prayer. The disciples in the early church prayed 
in other phrases and forms. 

Jesus left nothing else in fixed form or phrase. 
His religion went out and on from him by contact 
and contagion. His personality, so far as possi- 
ble, became transferred into other personalities. 
Life was the great personal dynamic in the days 
of Jesus, as it is now. He trusted his message 
primarily to life and not to statement. He even 
, so left it that our knowledge of him should depend 
almost wholly upon the personality of the men 
with whom he associated. We look at John and 
we see Jesus as John saw him. John's person- 
ality is the mirror in which the personality of 
Jesus is reflected. Is the mirror faithful? Does 
it give back the image correctly? Are there 
blemishes in the glass? Do we see indeed 
darkly? The apostles are our intermediaries. 
What kind of men are they? We can name 
them, but what are their characteristics? 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 185 

The apostles were at best humble men, — peas- 
ants, fishermen, Galileans, Jews. A powerful 
personality had affected them. Yet they were 
not reduced to a dead level, or raised to the same 
high plane. They preserve their own personali- 
ties, their individualities, their peculiarities. 
Inspiration has not flattened all the contours of 
personality, — rather it has increased the eleva- 
tions and exalted the mountain ranges and peaks. 
Paul is not like John. Luke writes differently 
from Mark. Matthew and Peter have marked 
distinctions. Each writer, differing from all 
others, presents a different aspect of the Christ, 
shows a distinct facet of the one central person- 
ality. 

Not that these differences are broad and strik- 
ing. Many Christians, who have read their 
Bibles for years, do not know that differences 
exist within the compass of the New Testament 
books, differences in conception and differences in 
the delineation of the one common Lord, the 
Christ. But the differences are there, and care- 
ful scholarship has long taken note of them. 
Based upon this recognition of characteristic 
differences in the point of view and in the doc- 
trinal conclusions of the writers of the New 
Testament, an entirely separate department of 
theological learning has become known in recent 
years, the department of Biblical Theology. 



186 &(EIV WINE SKINS 

Systematic theology takes its point of view 
with God, with external, outside truth, to see the 
parts and the whole in mutual relations. Dog- 
matic Theology takes its point of view with the 
Church, to vindicate and justify what she believes 
and proclaims ; while Biblical Theology takes its 
stand by the Bible, not to cite and quote specific 
texts, not with any assumption that the Bible is 
the only source of information and the only court 
of appeal, but to discover exactly what the Bible 
is as a whole, and what it teaches in its various 
parts, book by book. 

Biblical Theology recognizes the fact that with- 
in the compass of the New Testament itself 
there are distinct types of doctrine and teaching. 
There is a Pauline theology and a Johannine 
theology; Luke presents the person of Christ 
after one manner, Mark and Matthew each after 
another, while John distinct from them all ; James 
differs from Paul ; the Hpistle to the Hebrews has 
its distinctive features. 

Biblical Theology recognizes personalities ; it 
acknowledges distinctions, individualities, peculi- 
arities. It gives heed to times of composition, to 
chronological arrangements and relations, and to 
stages of development and growth. It is right. 
Jesus did not give a system of faith or ethics to 
men. He touched men ; he imparted life ; he 
aroused and quickened personalities. Soul cult- 
ure was his object, not mere head and brain 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 187 

culture. When a soul had begun to grow, he left 
it to develop, and by its impact on others to stim- 
ulate them to life and growth. His message was 
intrusted, not to documents or writings, not to 
statutes or decrees, not to rules or canons, not to 
forms and phrases, not to systems and institu- 
tions, but to men, to persons. For the propaga- 
tion of his kingdom Jesus relied upon and em- 
ployed personalities. 

What supreme confidence the Almighty has 
always reposed in human nature ! He made man 
and endowed him with the plenitude of free 
moral agency and personal responsibility. He 
intrusted his Son to incarnate form amongst men ; 
he let men have power over that Son, even to the 
lengths of crucifixion. 

What supreme confidence Jesus evinced in 
humanity ! We safeguard our little ideas. When 
we organize an institution, we carefully phrase a 
constitution and by-laws, and strenuously hedge 
against amendments and changes. When we 
endow colleges and seminaries, we punctiliously 
prescribe that the income of our benefactions 
shall be used only for promulgating certain forms 
of teaching, and we insist that men shall sub- 
scribe periodically to a creed or statement which 
perpetuates us and our conclusions, as though we 
knew the whole truth for all time, and could not 
trust our fellow-men of this and future genera- 
tions to think for themselves and administer what 



188 V^EIV JYINE SKINS 

is really out of our control, in changed conditions, 
better than we ourselves could plan. When we 
establish churches and ordain men to the min- 
istry of Christ, we insist upon exact phrases and 
tenets, as if a man by some chance might differ 
from us and so go astray ! 

Jesus trusted men. When he was no longer 
present in the flesh, men became his representa- 
tives. The very name given them signified that 
they were patterns of Christ. They represented 
him, and in a very real sense Christians became 
the incarnation of Christianity. This was at a 
time when there was no New Testament of any 
kind, and they were making the books of the 
New Testament. Christ left his life in them. 
They were the personalities of the message then. 
They might but partially comprehend, they might 
for a season totally misunderstand and misrepre- 
sent; but he trusted them. Heresies, schisms, 
" holy " — oh, the mockery of the term ! — " holy 
wars" might arise; but he trusted men. Pride 
and arrogance might elate pontiffs and prelates ; 
lust of power and greed for gain might fill the 
minds of those appointed to minister unto the 
world ; but yet he trusted men. All his kingdom 
was left to the care of men ; all that he came to 
accomplish by his life and death was committed 
to the custody of men; all of his ministry of 
compassion and grace was assigned to men. 
What exaltation of personality was this ! Was 



THE HISTORICAL SETTING 189 

ever greater honor conferred upon humanity ? 
The Christ by his coming and by his treatment 
has glorified the personality of man. 

Yet herein arise the problems of inspiration, 
for in the reception and extension of the message 
the human element persists ; and the problems of 
that criticism which is called " higher/' but more 
appropriately should be named historical, for the 
times and places and circumstances of the authors 
must be known before their utterances can be 
understood ; and the problems of Biblical The- 
ology, for the similarities and differences between 
different authors must be noted and weighed 
before their combined message can be interpreted 
and comprehended ; and the problems of Pales- 
tinian geography and topography and of local 
Jewish thought and theology, for until the people 
and places of his earthly career are known no 
one can be assured that he did not owe his great- 
ness to his times and his environment ; and the 
problems of comparative religion and comparative 
civilizations, because only in a recognition of the 
universal religious needs of the race and a com- 
parison of the searchings and conclusions of wor- 
shipers of all time can the superiority of the final 
and divine form be proven unto thinking men. 

The New Testament evangel has been set in a 
framework made up of human elements, which 
need to be investigated and tested that the divine 
in its setting may be brought to light and clearly 



190 V^EIV JVINE SKINS 

seen. The problems may seem at times to be 
many, but the data at hand for their solution are 
abundant, and the recompense of the reward 
unto the searcher after truth is rich and assuring. 



The Problem of Practical Work 



VIII 

THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND 
METHODS 

BY 

REV. C. S. PATTON, A. IVL, 

Pastor of the University Congregational Church, 
Ann Arbor, Mich. 



The Minister's Personality and Methods 



What view one takes of the details of any 
calling will depend more or less strictly upon one's 
view of the calling as a whole. Minor differences 
of opinion usually grow out of some more funda- 
mental difference. Speaking practically, perhaps 
superficially, there are two more or less clearly 
distinguished views of the ministry. One of 
these is that it is a calling far removed from any 
and all others in the world ; that the motives 
which lead men into it should be as far as possi- 
ble from the motives which lead men into other 
honorable callings ; that the feelings which sus- 
tain one in its labors are unlike those which make 
men in other callings willing to undergo similar 
toils and hardships ; and that, the ministry being 
thus totally unlike all other human pursuits, the 
minister should habitually maintain the separate- 
ness to which God has called him, and be as 
much unlike his fellows as he can. Such is the 
attitude of ministers who always dress as much 
like a separate order of beings as possible, — men 
of the long-tailed coat and the white necktie 
every day in the week and all the year around ; 
men in whom the clergyman swallows up the 



196 fJ{E]V IVINE SKINS 

human being, and who lose themselves in their 
profession ; who commune with God not so much 
because it is every man's privilege to do so, but 
because there are no persons upon the earth, 
especially among the laity, with whom it is 
profitable to commune. 

The second view is the reverse of this. It is 
that the minister is first of all a man, and that as 
much of a man as he is, so much of a minister 
will he be, and no more. That the few things 
which mark him off from his brethren are inci- 
dental, compared with the things that link him to 
them. That he will succeed, not in so far as he 
holds himself aloof from men and fails to appreciate 
them, but in so far as he knows them and is one 
of them. That the motives which govern honor- 
able men in honorable callings the world around 
are motives for the minister, and that, like his 
pattern, he is to keep himself in all things like 
unto his brethren, with the single exception 
which will hereafter appear. It is this view of 
the minister and his work which will determine 
the items for success that I shall set before you ; 
for it is certainly this view that my own experi- 
ence teaches me more and more to hold. 

The first essential of success in the ministry is 
the right sort of life and character. The minis- 
ter's business is to make men better, but except by 
mistake no man can make other folks any better 
than he is himself. More men fail in the minis- 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 197 

try, twice over, because they are not quite good 
enough than for any and all other reasons. And 
yet here I do not mean that the minister should 
endeavor to establish a monopoly upon any pecu- 
liar kind of goodness, nor that ministerial goodness 
is different in kind from any other sort of good- 
ness. I do not think that many men fail in the 
ministry because they are not unworldly enough, 
nor because they are not pious enough nor reli- 
gious enough ; I think they often fail because 
they are not honest enough, not kind enough, not 
unselfish enough. The goodness which men care 
for in a minister, and which will go far toward 
making his work a success, is not a goodness 
unlike that which they demand in other good 
men ; it is our common human goodness, accentu- 
ated, increased, multiplied. 

Of this, however, it is of little or no use to 
speak. A man's character is pretty well formed 
by the time he is old enough to enter the Chris- 
tian ministry. If he is not the right kind of man, 
it is too late to make him over at that time in his 
career. You may patch him up a little, — some- 
times you cannot even do that, — but if he has 
come to the entrance of the ministry and has not 
the personal habits and character that are the 
prerequisites for making men around him better, 
about all you can do is to get him sent to the 
legislature. If he has no charity, no ingrained 
unselfishness, no habitual preference for others 



198 tHElV JVINE SKINS 

over himself; if he is opinionated, censorious, 
sour ; above all, if he is not absolutely honest 
and straightforward, you cannot do anything with 
him in the ministry. If I do not speak more at 
length of this, it is not because it is not the most 
important of all items, for it is ; it is because it is 
a matter not to be mended or made after one is 
already standing at the threshold of the Christian 
ministry. 

I do not hold to a varying standard of ethics, — 
a sliding scale which puts the demands at one 
place for one profession, and the demands for 
men in other callings at other places. I hold to 
the absolute moral equality of the minister with 
all other good men. Whatever demand the law 
of God makes upon the minister it makes upon 
every man. And yet, we must consider the place 
in which we stand. The good or the evil that a 
man may do varies largely with the position he 
occupies. For a President of the United States 
to be a drunkard or a debauchee may be no 
worse for him individually than for any other 
man to be the same. But in its influence upon 
public morals it is worse than for a hundred 
unknown men to go wrong. The minister is in a 
sense a public man. He must expect that ques- 
tionable conduct upon his part will be magnified 
by the public. Things which would be passed 
over in other men will be dragged to light in his 
career. For him to have even the appearance of 



THE MINISTER'S TERSONALITY AND METHODS 199 

going wrong means the destruction of his useful- 
ness, reproach upon his profession, and disgrace 
to his name. Therefore a part of the minister's 
profession is to avoid even the appearance of 
evil. Indiscretion is deplorable in other men ; in 
the minister it is criminal. There are not many 
men in the ministry who are consciously bad. 
But so high is the standard which men demand of 
the ministry that the presence in it of men who 
are indiscreet, who are not wise and self-con- 
trolled, is a burden which loads it down sadly. 
It is not enough for a minister to be good ; he 
must be known to be good. Those who would be 
glad to see his profession dishonored must have 
no opportunity to bring it into disgrace by reason 
of his carelessness. He should remember who 
he is. 

After the right kind of character, the first 
essential for rational success in the Christian 
minister is a rational idea of what success is, and 
how it is to be measured. A man must accept 
his times for what they are. He cannot dp in 
one age what he might have done in another. 
He should do what he can, and all he can, but 
he should not discourage himself by reaching after 
the impossible, nor should he reproach himself 
with failure because he has measured his results 
by false standards. I do not believe that the in- 
fluence of the minister is waning or is destined to 
wane. Much less do I believe his function is 



200 tKEJV IVINE SKINS 

fulfilled by the religious periodical, the religious 
novel, or the daily press. But everybody knows, 
or ought to know, that for the last generation the 
character of religion has been gradually but surely 
changing. The type of theology preached is no 
longer calculated to produce the same immediate 
and startling results that have been secured in 
other days. If the old type of religious thought 
should be preached again, the same results could 
not again be produced by it; for it no longer finds 
the same sort of soil into which to sink. 

A clergyman of this State recently said to me : 
' 'When I was a young man I had a continuous 
revival in my church. And as I look back upon 
myself as I was at that time, my present con- 
viction is that I did not know enough to go in 
when it rained. But now, when I have really 
something to preach, and know how to preach it, 
I cannot do anything." That is, he meant he 
could not produce results that seemed commen- 
surate with his effort, as compared with the 
results of his labors years ago. We may de- 
plore this; but at least it is wise to accept it. 
"Expect great things from God, attempt great 
things for God," some man will quote to you. 
Yes; that is, rationally interpreted, expect from 
God what you have reason to believe God is 
likely to do, and attempt what you have reason 
to think can be done. The man whose ideal is 
not higher than his performance will soon deteri- 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 201 

orate in both. But the minister who is discour- 
aged because he cannot do the same sort of work 
by his preaching as he could have done by it 
forty years ago is foolish. The results of his 
work must be measured by a standard that fits 
the time in which he works. How figures do lie 
when you come to the work of the minister ! 
Why do we allow ourselves to stand or fall ac- 
cording to the Year Book? Why do we bow 
down so before the mere matter of numbers? 

I knew a young clergyman who upon gradua- 
tion from the seminary took a church of two 
hundred members in one of our Western States. 
In three years he had increased the membership 
to five hundred. This phenomenal accomplish- 
ment was heralded in the papers, religious and 
otherwise, of his section of the country, and 
made him a great name. He was called to one 
of the larger churches in one of the larger and 
more important cities of the middle West, and 
last June he received the degree of Doctor of 
Divinity. But he could not have remained in the 
church which he thus built up a year longer. 
Already his influence was waning. The man 
who has followed him has seen his congregations 
dwindle and pine in spite of all he could do. 
Not one single department of the church is to-day 
permanently stronger than it was ten years ago. 
Meanwhile the taste of the community has been 
debauched by nickel-plated oratory, and by cheap 



202 ${EW WINE SKINS 

dramatic entertainments on Sunday evening, 
called lectures. The Sunday school has grown 
large and noisy ; the church rolls have been 
swollen with the names of men, women, and 
children who have no intelligent or lasting inter- 
est in the church, and in every possible respect 
the church was worth a good deal more before 
this phenomenal young man got hold of it. 

On the other hand a church may remain sta- 
tionary in numbers and make a steady gain in 
spiritual influence. I would not imply that the 
smaller one's tangible results the better he should 
be satisfied. Nor yet that the absence of visible 
results necessarily indicates a valuable work 
beneath the surface. But who is the successful 
minister? I have only one answer. He is the 
man who succeeds in making the little world in 
which he lives better and more Christian. The 
man who goes into the ministry to-day expecting 
to turn the world upside down will be disap- 
pointed. Or if he is not, those who watch him 
and those who follow him are apt to wish that he 
had left it right side up. 

1 name, in the third place, among elements of 
success in the ministry, an ability to appreciate 
the secondary motives for ministerial work. And 
by that somewhat enigmatical phrase I mean 
something as follows : Everyone knows what 
the main motive of life and work in the gospel 
ministry should be. A man should go into the 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 203 

ministry because he feels a high and noble im- 
pulse toward it ; because he feels that in no other 
place can he make his life count for so much for 
God and mankind. It ought to be an act of con- 
secration or of noble self-sacrifice, as when the 
sailor plunges into the sea to rescue a drowning 
man. But a man cannot be in that state of mind 
all the time, can he? It was a saying of Edmund 
Burke that no nation founded solely upon the 
heroic virtues could stand. I suppose he meant 
because no nation could be forever in the heroic 
frame of mind ; and it would be unreasonable to 
suppose that ministers can do what other folks 
cannot. 

And what will the minister do when it does 
not appear as if he were accomplishing anything 
worthy of sacrifice? When the rainbow tints that 
surrounded his entrance into the ministry have 
vanished, and he finds himself laboring among 
details that are wearisome and distressing, for 
people who do not appreciate him, with the 
narrow, the intolerant, the unwilling ; when in- 
stead of dwelling all the time, as some suppose 
ministers do, upon the heights of religious feeling, 
or in association with poets and philosophers, he 
has to spend it talking to the old ladies who 
grumble because he has not been around to see 
them for so long, or in trying to bring back to his 
fold some narrow-minded brother who is intent 
upon going where "he can get the Simon pure 



204 2{EIV JVINE SKINS 

gospel "; when he has to turn his back upon that 
which he feels would be for his own highest in- 
terest and the best interest of his people, and 
spend half his time doing what they have grown 
accustomed to demand of their ministers, — what 
will the minister fall back upon then? The glo- 
rious opportunities of the ministry? But they do 
not always look glorious. The high character of 
his calling? But it does not always look so high. 
Religious feeling? It is literally drummed out of 
him by the incessant round of petty duties, half 
of which he feels might just as well, or better, 
be left undone. Upon what, then? Why, upon 
this : the simple fact that every honest man must 
earn his living, and that that is his first and 
supreme duty in life. The minister does not 
cease to be a man ; and there is no man living 
whose first duty to the world is not to earn an 
honest living. But he must earn it, not simply 
take it, and it must be an honest one, — a dollar's 
worth of good hard work done for every dollar 
paid him. And why should not the desire to 
earn an honest living help to keep a man faithful 
to the duties of the ministry as well as to those 
of any other calling? 

" But that introduces the mercenary spirit into 
the ministry," some one will say. Not at all. No 
man should go into the ministry for money; and 
the Lord has mercifully provided against any such 
temptation by ordaining that any man of average 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 205 

intelligence can earn more at almost anything 
else than he can at preaching. But when a man 
is once in the ministry, for the reasons that may 
properly put him there, there is nothing dishon- 
orable, but quite the reverse, in his earning like 
a man the salary that is paid him. 

One danger to ministerial faithfulness comes 
from the fact that the financial stimulus which 
helps average mankind to do its work is absent 
from the ministry. A good many ministers 
would do considerably more work in a given time 
if the money they received were more in direct 
proportion to the work they do. Many are the 
times I have felt like getting onto my horse, and 
going off into the country for a two hours' ride, 
when I have been called back and set to reading 
my books or making my calls, from the mere 
thought that if I did not do this I should not be 
earning my salary. And sometimes there is not 
much else to keep one going, — 1 mean for the 
time. One cannot be forever in the heroic frame 
of mind. 

The thing that the minister ought to do will 
often at that particular moment not look to him at 
all like an indispensable thing ; he cannot make 
it seem that the salvation of the world, or any 
portion of it, is nearly or remotely dependent 
upon it. But he can say to himself at least that 
he is paid for it and that therefore he ought to do 
it, and to do it heartily and well. You will say at 



206 VKEIV WINE SKINS 

once that this is not the highest motive by which 
to keep a minister at work. I know it. I do not 
advertise it as such. But a thing may not be the 
most ethereal thing in the universe, and yet may 
be very useful and honorable in its own place. 
The beginning of a man's ministry is like the 
honeymoon ; it's a very exalted state, but it can- 
not last always. But after it is gone, there may 
be more sober satisfactions, and more workable 
motives upon which he can fall back for the pur- 
suit of an honorable and useful career. 

The minister, as the world has known him so 
far, is not above needing the motives that appeal 
to ordinary men ; he is in fact altogether too much 
removed from them. When the doctor neglects 
his patients his income falls off. If the lawyer 
will not work, neither does he eat. But the min- 
ister folds his hands and the ravens feed him. I 
would not advocate any other system of financial 
remuneration. So much a pastoral visit, so much 
a sermon written, would render the minister's 
work mercenary. But the fact that the com- 
munity puts him upon his honor, pays him so 
much and leaves him to do his work how and 
when he will, should make him doubly and trebly 
scrupulous that he never gets a penny which he 
does not earn. 

A fourth quality more or less essential to suc- 
cess in the ministry of to-day is a sense of pro- 
portion. I attended an informal conference of 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 207 

some twenty Congregational ministers a few 
weeks ago, called to consider the state of the 
churches of our order in Maine. It appeared that 
in many localities the Congregational church has 
for some years made little or no gain. Some of 
the churches which have stood still or receded are 
in the country, others are in the cities. Many of 
them are manned by the young men whose vigor 
and enthusiasm would lead one to expect the very 
greatest results. During the discussion of the 
subject, one man, whose judgment all those 
present highly esteemed, declared, " I do not 
hesitate to say that many of the younger men in 
our denomination throughout this state are not 
the right men, and that the fault lies directly 
with them." Then he went on to say what he 
thought was wrong with these men; and what 
he said in substance was this : that a good many 
of these younger ministers had no sense of pro- 
portion in their preaching. They did not distin- 
guish between things that may be preached once 
in a while, and the things that must be preached 
all the time. To my mind this is a grave criti- 
cism. 

There never was a time when the sum total 
of human knowledge in every department was so 
legitimate material for the preacher as now. But 
not all things that the minister may utilize in 
his preaching are equally important. There are 
things that lie away off on the edges of the Chris- 



208 ^KEW WINE SKINS 

tian life ; there are other things that lie at the 
heart of it. I believe, for instance, in the meth- 
ods of the higher criticism and in the doctrine of 
evolution. I not only believe in them, but I be- 
lieve that to an extent generally unsuspected they 
have light to shed on the religious life of mankind. 
But they are not in themselves religion. And for 
the preacher to forget the great needs and capac- 
ities of the human soul while he preaches nothing 
but the doctrine of evolution, is to make of him- 
self not a preacher at all, but a mere lecturer. 
To bury the unquestioned, world-old facts of the 
religious life beneath the results of the higher 
criticism, is to feed people on husks. 

Do not misunderstand me on this point. I 
would go so far as to say that any young man who 
does not understand the methods of the higher 
criticism and the doctrine of evolution is unfitted 
to preach to an intelligent congregation in these 
days. I would not willingly ordain to the min- 
istry a young man whose intellectual equipment 
dates wholly from a half century ago. But nei- 
ther do I think a man prepared to do the work of 
a Christian minister who does not understand the 
fundamental facts of the spiritual life, and who 
cannot see that religion is something more than 
theology or science. A man must have a sense 
of proportion. He must know what things must 
be preached incidentally and what fundamentally. 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 209 

Another quality that the minister needs above 
other men is patience. Most men work with 
things. And when things do not go to suit, they 
can be made to conform. But the minister deals 
with people. And not only do people fail to do 
what one wants them to oftener than things do, 
but when they do so fail one cannot resort to the 
simple method of pushing and pounding them 
around till they do. People are conservative. I 
remember hearing a man tell a story once about 
how, when he was a boy at school, he proposed 
to some other boys that they should make a raid 
on the schoolmaster, and rescue a fellow mortal 
whom the said schoolmaster was unlawfully de- 
taining after school. The boys to whom the 
proposition was made gave their approval, and 
the designer of the plan of rescue did not observe 
any lack of the enthusiasm which such an adven- 
ture should arouse. The boy who had designed 
the rescue was to lead his followers to the school- 
house door, place his shoulder against it, and with 
a war whoop push it in upon the astonished occu- 
pants of the room. His followers were to imitate 
his example, and the schoolmaster was to find 
himself bound hand and foot before he had re- 
covered from his astonishment. The only trouble 
the first boy apprehended in the whole affair was 
lest the boys behind him should, in their eager- 
ness, press upon him so severely as to injure him. 
The line of boys approached the door. The first 



210 V{EW WINE SKINS 

boy put his shoulder against it. He looked around 
upon his comrades, gave his signal, and as a 
deafening roar arose from a dozen throats, in 
he rushed. The schoolmaster stood upon the 
threshold and quietly grasped him by the collar. 
And where were the boys whose unrestrained 
fierceness the leader had feared might overwhelm 
him and spoil the success of his plan? They 
stood timidly without, looking in at the door to 
see what the master would do with the ring- 
leader. 

Many a minister gets himself into situations 
much like this. He proposes something to his 
people, and they assent, as people often do with- 
out respect to what they really think. He rushes 
in, expecting to be followed by a line of people 
who in their eagerness to assist him will almost 
crush him. And when he finds himself in the 
presence of the enemy he finds himself there 
alone. The most anyone will do is to look in and 
see how it fares with him. When such a thing 
happens, the minister usually feels himself tre- 
mendously aggrieved, reproaches mankind in 
general and his own parish in particular for its 
dullness. But nine times out of ten it is the 
minister's fault. If the thing he wishes to do 
really ought to be done, he can get plenty of 
people to help him do it, if he will take the time 
and have the patience required. And if he rushes 
into things into which no one will follow him, let 
him blame himself and learn from his experience. 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 211 

Some of you perhaps have read Mr. Sheldon's 
book, " The Crucifixion of Philip Strong." Philip 
Strong — not Wise, Green, or Young — went into 
a community in which he had no acquaintances 
whatever. He walked up and down the streets a 
few times, and made up his mind what ought to 
be done. He announced that he would preach 
upon the social aspects of Christianity, and 
before he had been in town three weeks he had 
told his people that they must leave undone all 
the things they had been doing, and do all the 
things that they had been leaving undone. He 
waited a month, and then made to them proposi- 
tions more startling than his original one. Waited 
a month longer, and made others that were still 
more novel and revolutionary. His people, of 
course, as anyone but a crazy man would have 
anticipated, rebelled, and would do nothing. He 
died of a broken heart. 

What a comic tragedy! Grant that all the 
things that Philip Strong wished his people to do 
were wise things, — about which there might 
undoubtedly be a good deal of difference of 
opinion, — but grant that they were all without 
exception wise and practical ; then all that was 
necessary was for Brother Strong to exercise a 
little judgment, and after that a good deal of pa- 
tience, and he could have got them done, and he 
wouldn't have split his church to pieces, nor killed 
himself either. As it was he did both, and did 



212 V^EW WINE SKINS 

both without accomplishing any of the things 
which he set out to do. And the melancholy 
thing about the story is that it is calculated to give 
the impression that all this was the fault of the 
people and not the fault of the fresh and hare- 
brained minister. 

Or, to leave hypothetical cases, I knew a man 
who took a church in Connecticut a few years 
ago. He looked the ground over, decided that 
the church ought radically to revise its policy 
owing to changes in its environment, spoke to the 
people about it, found that they did not respond, 
scolded them, accused them of running their 
church as a mutual admiration society, got mad 
and got everybody else mad, drove off a lot of 
his best folks, and finally took himself off without 
accomplishing a single one of the things which 
he deemed absolutely essential. Since then an- 
other man has gone to the same field, handicapped 
by the rashness and impatience of his predeces- 
sor, and, by merely taking a little time to it, has 
actually done without the least friction all the 
things which the first man proposed to do. 

People are slow. They have a great variety 
of things to think of. The minister hatches a 
plan in his' own brain, and, after thinking about it 
continuously for a month or even a year, springs 
it upon his people, who have never even dreamed 
of it. Then he is surprised to find that they do 
not take up with it at once. He cuts off a shoot 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 213 

from an idea that has been growing in his mind 
for months, and drops it into the minds of his 
people, where it falls among an infinite deal of 
rubbish that will hardly give it a chance to get 
root even with time ; and then he is astonished 
and discouraged because the next day this has 
not grown in the minds of his people to the same 
size which it has reached in his own. One can 
hardly believe without experience how slow peo- 
ple are. I have preached to one congregation 
now for eight years. Among other things I have 
preached in season and out of season, whenever 
I could work it in by hook or by crook, the doc- 
trine of non-partisanship in local politics. After 
election last fall a very intelligent man in my 
congregation remarked to me — perfectly inno- 
cently — that he did not scratch his ticket for 
sheriff, "because," said he, "I have always 
voted a straight ticket." Evidently all I had said 
in eight years upon this subject had failed to make 
the slightest impression upon this good man's 
mind. And yet he is exactly the man who can 
be depended upon to do whatever he sees should 
be done. But people are slow. No one has quite 
so much need to let patience have her perfect 
work as the Christian minister. 

It has been often enough asserted that if a man 
is to succeed in the ministry he must have a 
genius for labor. Beside that I place the state- 
ment that he must also have a genius for relaxa- 



214 V^EJV WINE SKINS 

tion. The Lord deliver us all from a tired min- 
ister. Of all human beings he is the most 
doleful. In the pulpit and out of it he is a wet 
blanket. Nobody wants to see him, nobody 
wants to hear him. The world is tired enough as 
it is. And things look blue enough to it. To be 
preached to by a lump of biliousness or a bundle 
of nervous prostration cannot make it wiser or 
better. 

Virility is always the demand of the pulpit. 
That a man should have himself in hand, so that 
he cannot merely do something but can feel like 
it, — can relish his work and do it as if it were 
play, — is one of the things that make a minister's 
work go well. But energy must have a chance 
to accumulate. It is like money; all spending 
and no saving soon makes an end of it. Among 
the necessities of human life work comes first, 
and play comes next. In the analysis which Dr. 
Stuckenberg made of our community, you ob- 
served that among all the social forces, play holds 
a place next to the top. And this is true of the 
mass of the people in this and other communities. 
If, now, you consider the ministers of this or any 
average community, and see how almost every 
one of them keeps pegging away at his work 
from one week's end and from one year's end to 
another, you would have some clue to the fact 
that the average of spirits and of cheerfulness in 
the Christian ministry is so often below the aver- 
age of the same qualities in men at large. 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 215 

The reason so many ministers take a bilious 
view of the world and its inhabitants — why they 
think things are going from bad to worse, why 
they become misanthropic and hopeless, and so a 
burden upon the community and a block in the 
way of progress — is because they have in their 
lives so little of the element of recreation. You 
cannot make a good minister by relaxation, but 
you can spoil a good one by the lack of it. Of 
all men in the world the minister needs to look 
out upon human life with an unjaundiced eye and 
a sane and wholesome mind. But people who 
are always tired are never exactly sane nor 
largely wholesome. Things never look to them 
as they really are. I know more ministers than 
one whose sermons, whose theology, whose total 
view of human life would be improved fifty per 
cent if they would merely take their share of 
wholesome recreation. Cheerfulness is one of 
the minister's qualifications ; and cheerfulness in 
most instances is merely a symptom of good 
physical condition. 

As to methods of recreation, every man must 
choose for himself. What is work to one man is 
play to another. And let the minister, in seek- 
ing recreation, get rid of the conventionalities 
of his profession. Whatever he can personally 
do with a clear conscience, and with delight and 
refreshment, let him do, and let the elderly ladies 
think whatever seems to them appropriate. 



216 WEIV JVINE SKINS 

And this leads me to say — for it lies next door 
to what I have been saying — that many minis- 
ters fail of their best usefulness because they 
have no knowledge of men. They know theol- 
ogy, they know history, they know books, but 
folks they do not know. I have been absolutely 
surprised, not to say chagrined, at the things that 
will be said by a lot of ministers in consultation. 
Take the average ministers' meeting; let any 
topic that pertains to the popular mode of living 
or thinking come up, — such for example as 
theater-going, Sunday newspapers, or the en- 
forcement of the prohibitory law, — and nine 
ministers out of ten will give utterance to senti- 
ments that nine business men out of ten would 
merely laugh at. They will almost invariably 
betray the fact that as to how people actually live, 
what people at large actually think, and how the 
world looks to the folks that live in it, they have 
no conception. And this, I take it, is the reason 
why the ministers, with the assistance of some 
well meaning people, are always rushing into 
some movement for the regeneration of the world, 
in which they expect to be followed by the sober 
element of the community, and why they are 
always complaining when in most of their devices 
for making the earth into a kingdom of heaven 
instanter the business men and the people gener- 
ally will not sustain them. If I had to leave the 
enactment of the laws of this State to the men of 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 217 

any calling, I should consider them safer in the 
hands of the blacksmiths, or the carpenters, or 
the bricklayers, than in the hands of the clergy. 
That is not because these other men are more 
intelligent than ministers are, it is because they 
know the people so much better. This is the 
reason, I take it, why in times past the world has 
never prospered when the clergy have had a 
monopoly of things. It has always been the 
weakness of the ministry to be separated from 
the people. Therefore I say that anything that 
can bring a minister into better touch with folks 
is a source of strength to him. And while the 
world is so full of people, why should we go to 
second-hand sources for our information about 
them? 

What is the separation of one class of men 
from another, about which we talk so much, but 
the natural and inevitable result of the ignorance 
of one class of men as to the lives of other men? 
The world is occasionally cursed by a worldly 
minister, but an unearthly minister is no blessing, 
and he is a good deal more common. The minis- 
ter who knows books and not men may be 
learned, profound, and even spiritual ; but he will 
put people to sleep, he will drive them away, he 
will engender a popular distaste for religion ; the 
minister who knows men, even if he does not 
know books, may be crude, he may be illogical, 
unphilosophical, but he will at least be human, 



218 t^ElV WINE SKINS 

and all kinds of people will find something in his 
ministrations to do them good. But for that 
matter, there is no reason why a man should be 
ignorant of people just because he knows some- 
thing about books. 

I name one more essential of success in the 
Christian ministry of to-day. And that is pro- 
gressiveness. It is not so much a question of 
being liberal or conservative, as those words 
stand for definite theological positions ; it is a 
matter of being on the move. No minister can 
preach for a long time to the same congregation 
acceptably unless he grows. I do not care how 
good a preacher he is ; if he is the same kind of 
preacher at the end of one year as he was at the 
beginning of the year before, people will have 
become tired of him. I do not care how liberal 
he is, how much ahead of the times, a man can- 
not very well have any following if he himself 
stands still. He need not have an itching for 
something new, he need not plunge ahead just 
because he feels he must, without reference to 
whither he is going; but as God has made it 
possible for him, he must move. When people 
see the same scenery every time they look out of 
the window, they soon become tired of riding, 
even on the gospel train. Let a man be never so 
good a preacher, let every sermon be a finished 
oration, yet if every finished oration is practically 
the same as the last finished oration, and so on 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 219 

for ten and twenty years back, people will tire of 
finished orations. It is not required of a preacher 
that he should be brilliant, nor richly original, nor 
great in any particular, in order to interest people. 
It is necessary chiefly that he be a progressive 
man ; that when a church ties itself to him he 
should actually take it somewhere, and not merely 
stand fastened to it like a hitching-post to a horse. 

And this is equally true whether you consider 
matters practical or matters theoretical. The age 
calls for new methods. The old evangelism is a 
spent force. Only the man who knows what to 
put into its place, and has the courage and the 
forethought to put it there, can keep his church 
from going backwards. 

Perhaps this is even more evident when you 
come to matters of religious belief. It is often 
said that this is an age of theological unrest. And 
so it is. Among intelligent people everywhere 
there is every day more and more dissatisfaction 
with the stereotyped presentation of stereotyped 
religious beliefs. Occasionally, of course, there 
is an individual who wants exactly that and noth- 
ing else. But he is rare even now, and before 
the most of us are dead he will belong to a species 
wholly extinct. While he is here it is wise not to 
alienate him when it can be avoided ; not to scare 
him needlessly, nor to antagonize him. Offences 
must come, and they must come especially to the 
man who demands a type of thought which the 



220 ViEW WINE SKINS 

world has outgrown. But still it is more or less 
woe to the minister through whom the offence 
comes. Nevertheless, the world cannot wait for 
people who do not even promise to move ; and 
the presence in a congregation of a few such 
persons should not bind the minister's tongue 
from the utterance of the truths in which his soul 
really believes. And what is more, I may be 
mistaken but I give it as my conviction, that 
every year there is less and less patience on the 
part of the public with ministers who are sus- 
pected of believing one thing and saying another, 
or who are known to be afraid to declare their 
honest and profound convictions, or who are so 
eternally cautious that they never quite speak 
the whole truth before they die. People do not 
want a minister to be blunt, and there is no 
reason why he should be. They do not want 
him to be pugilistic, and there is every reason 
why he should not be. But they do want him, 
within the bounds of tact and wisdom, to be 
honest and frank. They have a good deal more 
patience with him for the utterance of beliefs 
which they do not share, than for shuffling. They 
will welcome the courteous declarations of con- 
victions which they do not accept rather than 
listen to utterances that are not convictions. 

For a good many years now, ever since the 
doctrine of evolution began to find general accept- 
ance among ministers, the pulpit has been full of 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 221 

apology, of half-truth, of shuffling and evasion. 
The pulpit has felt that the old order of truth 
could somehow be adjusted with the new; that 
things which God had sundered men could, by 
sufficient arguing, bring together. Speaking of 
the ministry as a whole, and allowing for notable 
and noble exceptions, when the ministry has 
abandoned any position it has not been when it 
has first perceived it to be untenable, but when it 
has at last been positively driven away from it. 
This sort of thing does not increase the popular 
reverence for the ministry as a body of truth- 
loving and truth-speaking men. In all this it is 
time for a new order. The pulpit now has more 
to fear from evasion than from plainness, — pro- 
vided always, of course, that the plainness be of 
the Christian sort. People will not be abused, 
they will not be sneered at or called mossbacks ; 
but there never was a time when they were so 
ready to be led as they are to-day. A man need 
not stand so straight that he falls over backwards. 
He need not absolutely unbosom himself upon all 
occasions. But after all, honesty, in ministers as 
in other folks, is the substratum of all virtue. 

And now if it seems to you that the things 
which I regard as elements of success in the 
Christian ministry are rather commonplace 
things, and that I have not enough insisted upon 
the considerations that are highest and most 
ethereal, for this there may be two reasons. 



222 tKElV WINE SKINS 

The first may be that the glory of the ministerial 
calling, the need of consecration, the value of 
piety and prayer and Christlikeness, have been 
sufficiently insisted upon in your hearing many 
times, and should anyway be taken for granted in 
any discussion pertaining to the Christian min- 
istry. To insist upon these things would seem 
like re-enacting the moral law. And the second 
reason may be that I was asked to speak to you 
out of my own experience. That this should 
reflect somewhat upon the high-mindedness of 
the speaker is one of the unfortunate but ines- 
capable incidents of such a situation. And yet I 
believe that the ministry is not by any means the 
only sphere — though it certainly is one of them — 
in which what is supposed to be over-high is often 
insisted upon to the absolute obscuration of that 
which is of as much more consequence as it is 
nearer the ground. The philosopher, you remem- 
ber, carrying his dinner in his hand and looking 
at the stars, fell into the brook; and as he got out 
he remarked to himself that if he had only 
looked into the brook he might have seen the 
stars and not have lost his dinner. 

The minister is not above the motives and con- 
siderations that appeal to other honest men, nor 
can he afford to look so much above the earth for 
all his incentives and encouragements that his 
feet will drop into unseen pitfalls upon his path. 
And, often, if he will look at what is immediately 



THE MINISTER'S PERSONALITY AND METHODS 223 

before him and around him, he will see mirrored 
in that the sun from which he draws his light, 
and the heaven he is to try to make. 



IX 

METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 

BY 

PROF. B. F. HAYES, D. D., 

Professor of Apologetics and Pastoral Theology, 
Cobb Divinity School. 



Methods of Evangelization 



Evangelization in its original sense meant the 
spreading of good news. The breadth of scope 
in the great commission to the disciples of Christ 
has been gradually coming into the vision of men, 
till now it is seen to include such a conveyance of 
the teaching of Jesus respecting the Father and 
the right relation of men to him and to each other 
as shall win them to choose Jesus for master and 
to become like him in spirit, conduct, and aim. 
That aim is to produce such prevalence of right- 
eousness and benevolence that at length our race 
shall obey the divine law of love, and our Lord's 
prayer that the Father's will be done on earth as 
it is in heaven shall be answered. 

There are no terms too broad or too emphatic 
to state the vastness of this work. It represents 
the highest thought known to us in God's plan of 
the creation. What thoughts and what results 
he may have for other worlds we know not, but 
for this planet the goal of his ages on ages of 
earth's preparation, of his education of the race 
through the slow and painful eons of its history, 
and of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ, is the 
production of a race conformed to the image of the 
divine man. 



228 CKEIV JVINE SKINS 

Our Lord allowed his disciples to understand 
that they were to see his kingdom begun on the 
earth ;* in fact that, though not yet visibly, it had 
already begun. f When after his ascension they 
began to carry abroad the good news to the 
nations, it is not impossible that they may have 
talked of finishing the work in a generation, as 
some in recent times have talked with no better 
reason for the expectation. And it is very possi- 
ble they did carry their message and win converts 
throughout what, in the limited geography of that 
day, was called the habitable world. But though 
the number who should publish the good news 
increased, their capacity and fidelity, and the fit- 
ness of their methods rapidly declined. 

DEFECTIVE METHODS OF THE PAST 

When about three hundred years after Christ 
the chief evangelists were Constantine and his re- 
cently pagan army, and their method a military 
order that all subject tribes shall make the sign of 
the cross, receive baptism, and henceforth call their 
religion Christian, however many pagan super- 
stitions and ceremonies it retained, Christ's idea 
of evangelizing the heathen world seemed lost ; 
the political method by which the Jews formerly 
had expected to master the world had taken its 
place. This notion of subjugating instead of con- 

* Luke 17 : 20, 21. 

t Matt. 16 : 28 and 24 : 34. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 229 

verting the world was the ruling idea when, the 
northern barbarians having trampled out the life 
of the Roman Empire, the Church erected an 
empire out of the ruins, and gave to the Bishop 
of Rome the title formerly borne by the emperors 
— Supreme Pontiff. The Church caused the con- 
querors of the empire to accept her religion, but 
it was a religion aimed not at securing obedience 
to God, and making men like Christ in their aims 
and character, but at training warriors for the 
subjugation of nations. 

A few, with purer and holier aspirations than 
such a religion fostered, betook themselves to 
solitary self-discipline in deserts, caverns, and 
cloisters. This course seemed almost the farthest 
removed from obedience to the command, " Go 
preach"; but by devoting themselves to multi- 
plying copies of manuscripts of the Gospels and 
Epistles, they became in an important sense 
successors of the first evangelists. 

In the main, however, the method of Constan- 
tine continued. Instead of evangelization, it was 
subjugation, with regeneration by baptism and 
the rites and dogmas of the church, which must 
be accepted on pain of torture and death. Thus 
was extended a form of religion called Christi- 
anity, but hardly less remote from the conception 
of Jesus than was the religion of the Jews who 
crucified him. One after another the Crusades 
were undertaken with the belief that these would 



230 3KEIV WINE SKINS 

extend the area of Christendom. The new 
world was discovered, and Spain's armies went 
forth with their priests ostensibly to evangelize, 
but, with some noble exceptions, only to gratify 
their greed for pleasure, power, and pelf. 

These things are mentioned among methods of 
Christianizing the world because these teachers 
were making known to peoples who had never 
heard of him the name and character of Jesus as 
they understood him, and were seeking to make 
Christians in accordance with their conceptions, 
believing that thus they were securing to men 
salvation. But there was in their thought no 
relation of character and life to salvation. 

Among them, however, were some teachers in 
whom, no doubt, a true and deep conversion had 
been wrought — men who had the spirit of Jesus, 
and knew he wished to send them as he was sent, 
to die, if need be, for men. God wrought also 
with such men as Ulfilas, who carried the gospel 
to the Goths of Germany, St. Patrick and his 
associates, who evangelized Ireland, Austin and 
his fellow monks, who taught Christianity to the 
Anglo-Saxons, carrying to them as seed that word 
from which has grown English liberty, English 
literature, manly character, and Christian philan- 
thropy. God was working also in St. Francis 
Xavier, St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas a Kempis, 
the Waldenses, and the Lollards ; though in all 
cases, then as now, the character of the agents 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 231 

and their conception of their work determined 
their methods and limited the results. To the 
mass of people then religion was only a kind of 
commercial or governmental arrangement for 
escaping punishment hereafter, and to the hier- 
archy it was a means of present power and 
emolument. " How exceedingly profitable/' said 
Pope Leo X. to the prelates around him, " has 
this Christianity been to us ! " 

Sometimes, below the cloud-bathed summit of 
a mountain, a fountain is found gushing from its 
side ; but the waters soon go out of sight, trick- 
ling through the deep crevices of its rocks, to 
reappear farther down and flow in a fertilizing 
rivulet over the plain. So the stream of divine 
law and love that came forth from the life that 
conquered on Calvary was hardly discoverable 
during all these turbulent ages. Now and then 
the roots of a sincere, earnest life had penetrated 
to those secret streams, and been made to grow 
to a height and beauty and fruitfulness whose 
beneficent vitality resembled that of the first 
century. 

Such in England were Wyclif and the evan- 
gelists he sent traveling over their country with 
parts of the Scriptures hidden in their garments 
to read to the people by night, when the doors 
were shut and the windows were darkened for 
fear of the priests. 



232 VKEJV WINE SKINS 

Their method was a partial return to the primi- 
tive, simple method of evangelization. They read 
or told the story of Jesus. The awakening that 
resulted spread into Europe, where its influence 
blended with an extensive movement among the 
Lollards, or followers of St. Francis of Assisi, 
who were calling on men to live and serve as 
Jesus did. These movements resembled in many 
features revivals of later times, and they pre- 
pared the way for a greater to follow when the 
invention of printing and the revival of Greek 
learning made it possible for Erasmus to give the 
original Scriptures to scholars, and for Tyndal and 
Luther to give them to the common people in 
their own tongue. 

It matters not that we are not wont to call the 
Reformation a work of evangelization. It may 
not have extended the area over which the story 
of the birth and death of Christ was known. As 
compared with pagan lands, Europe might have 
been called evangelized ; but compared with 
Christ's ideal, it would be equally just to say it 
was unevangelized. The Reformation began an 
advance towards that ideal. It introduced the 
method which should be regarded as essential in 
all evangelization, namely, the study of the Scrip- 
tures by each man for himself, untrammeled by 
tradition, and the exaltation of Christ as supreme 
source of authority and salvation. The result 
has been to give a more intelligent apprehension 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 233 

of what the life, death, and teachings of Christ 
signify, and a larger infusion of his spirit to 
every generation that has followed. But neither 
was the Reformation complete, nor were its 
effects entirely stable. 

In England it left a large place for the use of 
spectacular display and meaningless ceremony. 
The Puritan reformation eliminated the millinery 
and the mummery, but was so erratic, both in 
what it rejected and in what it retained, that its 
natural product was blear-eyed consciences and 
one-sided Christians, tithing mint, anise, and 
cummin, but despising many things now seen to 
be essential to symmetrical character, to high 
usefulness and happiness. It restricted the use 
and culture of the imagination, disdained the pro- 
duction and enjoyment of the beautiful, dwarfed 
the social side of nature by putting under ban 
many sources of innocent joy, the play instinct, 
and the expression of affection ; and, worst of all, 
it failed to give love its supreme place either in 
the character of God or of good men. 

Puritanism retained still as an inheritance from 
the dark and superstitious ages the notion that 
God works, not by means and according to laws, 
but by an immediate occult action of his power, 
and that Satan and other spiritual beings can act 
on man in the same magical way. They also 
retained a notion, coming from Augustine through 
Calvin, that the number of the saved and the 



234 VKEIV WINE SKINS 

lost was fixed by a divine decree irrespective of 
what individuals might be and do, and that evan- 
gelization being the Lord's work, the sending of 
missionaries to the heathen or any direct effort 
on the part of parents for the conversion of their 
children would be an unwarranted or impatient 
and useless interference with the Divine preroga- 
tive, because whatever he pleased to do, he 
would, in his own time and way, accomplish. 

At the same time, though in logical contradic- 
tion to this doctrine, they retained the belief, in- 
herited from the dark days before the time of 
Constantine, that people can be made Christians 
by a rite officially administered, either as a means 
of working some magical purification in the sub- 
ject, or of gaining for him by a meritorious cere- 
mony a title to covenanted mercies, so that if he 
died in infancy his salvation would be secured. 

This was a method of evangelization that left 
out of sight the purpose of our Father to secure 
in his children righteousness of character and the 
service of love. It made piety to consist in cere- 
monious observances and pharasaic severities 
instead of charity and mercy and habitual obedi- 
ence of the heart and life to the will of God. 

Such was the religious condition of the most 
evangelized portions of Europe and America after 
seventeen and a half centuries. 

Why had evangelization remained so low in 
grade and so limited in extent? Is not He who 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 235 

planned it almighty? Did not the Son of God 
when assigning the work to men say, "All power 
is given unto me? " Why, then, so little prog- 
ress in all these centuries? 

This question would seem unanswerable had 
we only that view of God's methods that once 
prevailed, namely, that whatever God undertakes 
is accomplished immediately and perfectly by a 
fiat of his will ; but later discoveries respecting his 
methods in general point us to the answer of the 
question in the facts: (i) That the method of 
God is not to force progress from without, but to 
secure its unfolding from within. This is an ac- 
celerating process, and the rate of progress in 
the development of human society now going on, 
slow as it seems, is as rapid as any of the eonic 
processes through which the earth passed in 
preparation for the birth of man. (2) That to 
whatever in the course of nature is assigned a 
long prenatal period and a long period of infancy, 
there is a correspondingly long and important 
maturity. (3) That all God's works for the com- 
pletion and improvement of the world for men 
are carried on through men. So all his works for 
the improvement of man himself are carried on 
through men ; and the rate of progress of these 
works, even the highest, depends upon the ca- 
pacity and fidelity of the human agents. 

When this last is considered, we see that since 
Christ ascended, God's work of human evangeli- 



236 ViEW IVINE SKINS 

zation is carried on by methods which men invent 
and adopt. And when we consider what the 
agents and their methods have been, we see that 
the work could not have proceeded otherwise 
than as slowly, and with as imperfect results as 
history shows. The growth and education of the 
human race and the progress of Christianity seem 
to be epitomized in the life of an individual. 
There is an infancy of slowly awakening facul- 
ties, emerging from animalism into the life of con- 
scious responsibility ; then a self-asserting, and at 
times turbulent and boisterous youth, followed by 
a passage into young manhood with higher aims, 
settled purposes, and better methods. 

Whether we should consider Christendom as 
now at the beginning of young manhood the his- 
torians of the future can judge better than we. 
But we certainly can claim no higher ascent. 
The Holy Spirit is always ready to inspire, but 
inspiration can be received only according to the 
capacity of the recipient. 

The religion of a man, and so of a people, al- 
ways corresponds, in the main, to the mental and 
moral grade of the person or his time; though 
the lower the grade of both, the more likely the 
individual and the church are to think their con- 
ception is the perfect and final religion. Thou- 
sands, no doubt, have lived and died as good 
Christians as they knew how to be, ignorant that 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 237 

the world's evangelization was waiting not so 
much for more Christians as for a better kind of 
Christians. 

APOSTOLIC METHODS REVIVED 

The world's evangelization was thus waiting at 
the beginning of the eighteenth century, a period 
in God's education of our race memorable for the 
appearance of agencies that have made the gen- 
erations that have followed more remarkable for 
Christian progress than any that preceded; 
though some of these agencies have yet only 
begun their career of beneficence, and all of 
them, in their present stage of development, are 
only prophecies of higher realizations of which, 
however, the fore-gleams already can be seen. 
None of them, indeed, were entirely new. They 
were rather reincarnations or higher conceptions 
of ideas that began to find expression in the first 
century. 

Of these agencies I will mention four. The 
first appeared when the Wesleys and Whitefield 
went forth from their Bible studies at Oxford 
with a message that caused men to cry out, 
4 'What must I do to be saved?" The second 
also began with the Wesleyan movement, but it 
began again independently with Robert Raikes in 
1780. The third was the conception of which 
the realization has been progressive and constant 
till the present time — that it is possible to deter- 
mine the laws and limitations and grounds of cer- 



238 3VE W WINE SKINS 

tainty of human knowledge, and the laws of 
men's mental and moral powers. This move- 
ment was begun by Emmanuel Kant and was 
promoted by the writings of Jonathan Edwards. 

Philosophy has been feared as anti-Christian, 
but those who denounced it as falsehood and 
folly because of the incompleteness and extrava- 
gances of its early stages made a mistake similar 
to that of those who denounce Christianity be- 
cause of its fanatical excrescences and heretical 
offshoots. The great inquiry begun — but only 
begun — in the 18th century has signally aided 
the establishment of truth in the field of theology. 

The early Christian fathers regarded the phil- 
osophy of Plato and Aristotle as the forerunner 
and handmaid of Christianity; and the great 
progress of philosophy, with the new science of 
the mind of man, to which it has given rise, is no 
less important to the Christianity of to-day. If 
not distinctly a method of evangelization, it is a 
John the Baptist to every other method. It distin- 
guishes the fit from the unfit in methods, and also 
in many cases the false from the true in doc- 
trines. It has banished doubt from many minds 
that otherwise would have been, like Thomas 
before he saw his Lord, unable to believe. 

Philosophy is an honest effort to find out the 
plan and method of God in order that man may 
think and work in harmony with it, and it finds 
the same principle which Christ declared to be 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 239 

the sum of the law, revealed in the mind of man, 
and that the moral welfare of every human being 
depends upon his obedience thereto. Psychology 
has discovered God's plan as it is expressed in 
the human mind, and all efforts at soul-saving 
must conform to that plan on pain of mingling 
injury with whatever good they do. Does this 
mean that every evangelist must be a student of 
philosophy as well as of Scripture? By no 
means, any more than every man that sails a 
ship must be an astronomer or a mathematician ; 
he may not know how the mathematician con- 
structs a table of logarithms, but he must know 
how to use such a table ; he may not know how 
the astronomer has discovered and proved the 
laws of celestial motion, but he must know how 
to take advantage of those laws. No less neces- 
sary is an understanding of the laws of the human 
mind to one who is to be a safe leader of his 
fellow-men. 

The fourth evangelizing agency whose rise 
dates from the eighteenth century was even more 
than the others the rediscovery of a first century 
idea. It is that of foreign missions. 

The work of evangelizing the world has two 
aspects: one in which the local church with its 
pastor assumes the work of Christianizing its 
own community and bringing its youth into the 
kingdom of Christ, the other is missionary 
evangelization. It includes both individual and 



240 ViElV IVINE SKINS 

organized effort to win for Christ families and 
communities that are included in no parish, 
whether they live in distant lands or in the next 
village. Home evangelization was earliest in the 
history of Christianity. The disciples began at 
Jerusalem by the Master's direction, but they 
were not all to remain there. The miracle of the 
ages was that Christianity survived the breaking 
up of the Jewish nation. It did so because it had 
gone abroad ; its preachers had not confined their 
labors to their own countrymen. There was 
power in it to meet the needs of humanity ; that 
power working through a few heretics, as Paul 
and his companions were called, transformed the 
religions and reformed the customs of the then 
civilized world. The law that was illustrated 
then is the law to-day. Christianity must evan- 
gelize ; that it make conquests is the condition of 
its life ; and its field is still the world. Every 
wise and faithful pastor will secure the practical 
interest of his people in foreign missions. He 
will do this by seeing to it that they have up-to- 
date information that will elicit their sympathy 
and their prayers ; and also that they are habitu- 
ated to some systematic method of offerings. 

It is not my purpose to discuss the methods of 
foreign missions, or to inquire whether these 
methods are all likely to continue the same as 
hitherto. Yet I am constrained to utter a warn- 
ing against a conception of evangelization that 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 241 

tends to vitiate its methods at home as well as to 
pervert the true foreign mission motive — the love 
of humanity, God's motive in sending his Son — 
into a false one, namely, to hasten the physical 
reappearance of our Lord on earth to set up a 
material kingdom. 

An expectation of such a return was doubtless 
cherished by Christians of the first century as 
an inheritance from their Jewish training ; for the 
Pharisees held and taught that not only would 
the Messiah make Jerusalem the capital of a 
world empire, but that their prophets and good 
kings and all pious Jews who had lived were to 
come out of their graves to share in the temporal 
blessings and triumphs of such a universal em- 
pire. With this hereditary teaching in their 
minds, it is not strange that the disciples, con- 
vinced that their Lord was alive from the dead, 
hastened to the conclusion that he would return, 
bringing the righteous dead with him, and set up 
the Kingdom which he said was " at hand." But 
the course of events refuted this opinion, and the 
lesson of nineteen centuries reiterates the refu- 
tation. Still the delusion has been revived by 
literalists from time to time along the Christian 
centuries ; especially during the tenth was this 
doctrine extensively and most earnestly preached, 
and greatly to the enrichment of the church that 
then was. Wealthy people in great numbers 
made over their property to the church, hoping 



242 VVEIV WINE SKINS 

thereby to secure a share in the joys of the mil- 
lennial kingdom to be ushered in with the end of 
the thousand years from the birth of Christ. 

This materialistic literalism survives in many 
minds and has contributed in the last half of the 
nineteenth century to an expectation much like 
that which characterized the end of the first 
thousand years. One evil effect of this teaching 
is the tendency to discount the work of thorough 
evangelization in Christian lands and give the 
impression which is manifest in some cases, that 
churches have no need or reason to exist save to 
furnish the evangelists and the means that they 
may run speedily over all the earth, that then 
with mighty catastrophe the end may come. 

The preaching of this doctrine has been re- 
garded by many as the most effective means of 
evangelization, and it has often resulted in secur- 
ing large numbers of professed adherents to 
Christianity. It was so in the years 1837 to 
1843. Believing this world about to end, many 
people strove for a title to a mansion in the next, 
as when a piece of unsettled territory in the 
West is opened for preemption men rush to stake 
out claims and locate corner lots. But when after 
1843 tne y found the promise not fulfilled, they 
returned to their old life with alacrity, often leav- 
ing behind them all their former faith in preachers 
and gospel. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 243 

The close of the century has seen a revival of 
this method, and it would be no strange thing if it 
should count converts in great numbers ; visible 
and material life can look so much more desirable 
to men than that which is spiritual. But when, 
as the century rolls on, the last hermit nation 
opens its doors to Christianity, no more to be 
closed, and the Gospel continues its slow work of 
leavening human society throughout the world, 
the propagators of Christianity by such methods 
will learn that our Lord meant more than they 
supposed when he said, "Go ye, and make dis- 
ciples of all nations." The Church needs only to 
obey this command in its furl significance, and we 
have no need to fear that Christianity will not 
ultimately triumph in all nations, and prove itself 
the universal and final religion. 

METHODS OF THE PRESENT 

As Christianity advances towards its goal the 
conception of it and of the methods of its propa- 
gation will advance as it continues to raise men 
to higher and higher planes of intellectual dis- 
cernment and moral achievement. 

In the nominally Christian lands, beside the 
large number that have always remained outside 
all Christian circles, affected only indirectly by 
Christianity, there is with each successive gen- 
eration a new population to be Christianized, and 
a new army to be recruited for carrying the 



244 ${EW WINE SKINS 

Gospel into regions beyond. Hence home or 
parish evangelization lies at the foundation of all 
work for extending Christ's kingdom throughout 
the world. 

I make no attempt to enumerate all the present- 
day agencies of home evangelization. Four seem 
to demand consideration : the home, the pulpit, 
the revival, and the Sunday school. 

THE HOME 

The first of these is doubtless the most impor- 
tant. When the Christian ideal of it is realized 
the methods and influences of the home will be 
more effective than all the other means of evan- 
gelization. 

Such is the opportunity in the home to make 
sure the beginning of Christian life in children 
that failure here is fraught with destiny. Prob- 
ably to-day the influences and the neglects in the 
homes of Christendom are more effective than all 
others together upon the decisions of our country- 
men whether to be Christians or not, and upon 
the kind of Christians they will be. But as the 
principles that should guide in the home as an 
agency of producing Christian character, and that 
of the best kind, apply also in the Sunday school, 
they may be considered in connection with that. 
Let it be remarked here, however, that if any 
two can with special confidence rely on the prom- 
ise, " If two of you shall agree on earth touching 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 245 

anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for 
them of my Father," they are the father and 
mother who are wisely agreed in the determina- 
tion to train their children for Christian character 
and service. 

THE PULPIT 

While the duties of the pastor and the lines of 
his activity are diversified beyond those of almost 
any other servant of the public, the conversion 
of men and training them for Christian service 
are the two functions to which especially his 
preparation and consecration should point. The 
functions of the preacher cannot be adequately 
discharged when all his labor is bestowed upon 
the church and for it, while their part is to listen 
and admire, or perhaps criticise. The true con- 
ception of a pastor is more like that of the coach 
of an athletic team than that which has so often 
prevailed, which likens him rather to a solitary 
athlete performing for the entertainment of the 
audience that pay him ! He may be thought of 
as the trainer and director of a company of 
Christian workers. 

When he assumes the leadership of a church 
he enters at once on a study of the needs of the 
community and the capacities and adaptabilities of 
the force he is to instruct and lead. He studies 
also to know what further possibilities for service 
may be developed. He is supposed to be deter- 



246 &(EIV WINE SKINS 

mined, since he loves God supremely, and his 
fellow-men according to his measure as Christ 
loves them, not to be content with simply helping 
his church respectably to carry on its religious 
routine, but rather that his church and himself 
shall be the leaven whose power shall constantly 
be felt penetrating farther and farther into the 
lump that surrounds them. 

This purpose can be realized. It can be under- 
taken in this twentieth century with greater con- 
fidence than at any previous period in modern 
times, notwithstanding all the rivalries of worldly 
interests, all the loosening of doctrine, and the 
vacillations of faith. But all depends on the ful- 
filment of conditions. When the spring freshet 
is of unusual depth, after frosts have been severe 
and snows have been deep, the farmer may 
doubt of his summer's crop. Just now he has 
something else to do instead of the usual plowing 
and sowing ; he must see that his bridges are 
made fast, their culverts and the ditches kept 
open ; and the flood, though it may here and 
there undermine an old tree or move a fence, 
will penetrate to the deepest roots of all that is 
alive, and will leave fertilization behind it. And 
so, just because of the unusually hard winter and 
severe freshet, the sagacious farmer will have a 
cleaner, less vermin-infested, and heavier crop 
when the harvest-time comes. So, I surely be- 
lieve, the present causes of trepidation are to 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 247 

introduce a period in which Christian work may 
be done under more rational and helpful auspices, 
with wiser methods and more abiding and valu- 
able results than ever before. 

But all this depends on conditions, as the real- 
izing of the harvest depends upon the fulfilment 
of conditions all the season through. But it may 
be said with even more certainty to every pastor 
and working church, "You will not fail to be 
leavening your lump, you will be ever adding 
to your numbers those that are being saved, 
provided you fulfill the conditions, provided 
you conform to the laws by which God works 
through men, women, and children for the 
saving of other men, women, and children." 
But little progress can be made toward the result 
while getting around or away from these condi- 
tions. A first condition is a consecrated mem- 
bership in the churches, — a membership whose 
purpose is to habitually obey the will of God in 
the daily routine of home and business; who 
make not self-pleasing, but Christ's law of love 
the law of their lives ; who are willing to spend 
time and thought and whatever they have to 
spend in order helpfully to influence other people. 

How can a pastor have in his church such 
members? He can at least be one such himself. 
Until he is, he can do little toward securing such 
a character in others. The pastor can know that 
his purpose is not selfish. He can know, and he 



248 fT(EPV WINE SKINS 

should know, that with his mind and his will and 
at least at times with his affections, he obeys 
Christ's supreme law of love to God and to men. 

If with this he has the shepherd instinct that 
goes after the strayed and the lost, and if he has 
the knowledge and the aptness that fit him to 
teach, and the ability and desire by his uttered 
thought and his personal presence to impress, 
persuade, and inspire his fellow-men — a combi- 
nation of qualities that constitutes a call to the 
ministry — then his church has a leader in the 
work of evangelization. 

And happy is that pastor who has a church of 
like spirit ; who do not cast their eyes down or 
sleep, but listen with cheerful faces when he 
explains the conditions of loving service and in- 
vites to its rewards ; and who give the encourage- 
ment of sympathetic countenance, also, when he 
instructs the young or reasons with the unde- 
cided. Almost every congregation has much to 
do with the making or the unmaking of the 
preacher as they sit in the pews before him. 

Think of Jesus saying as he sat for the last 
time with the eleven, and looked the love of his 
divine soul into the faces of that not strikingly 
intelligent group, "Ye are they that have con- 
tinued with me in my temptations." One can 
easily imagine that many times came up before 
him when, yearning to help them, he had given 
his parables to stolid multitudes that thronged 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 249 

eagerly enough to hear him, and then, like the 
swine, trampled his pearls beneath their feet be- 
cause these were not what their brutishness 
desired ; and then the expectant faces and trust- 
ful attention of these friends, and their request 
for fuller explanation afterward, had made the 
trial from the indifference and hard-heartedness 
of the multitude far less than it would have been. 
The silent sympathy of the disciples had helped 
Jesus to preach his gospel. It takes a preacher 
and a sympathetic flock — at least a faithful few, 
who will continue with him in his temptations — 
to preach the gospel effectively to-day. 

THE PARENTS AND THE PREACHER 

These were the two primitive agents for the 
propagation of religion. They were so in the 
pre-Christian time, for prophet and preacher are 
one. The functions of the preacher have changed 
with the centuries. They will continue to change. 
They will not diminish in importance and respon- 
sibility as the preacher becomes more and more 
distinctly the leader of all those who are carry- 
ing on, the work which Christ " began to do and 
teaeb" for the education in religion of our race. 
And yet as an evangelizing agency the preacher 
alone, and indeed the whole church, is subordi- 
nate to the parents. Baxter was not wrong 
when he said, " Public preaching is appointed 
for the conversion of those only that have 
missed the blessing of the first appointed means" 



250 f^EW WINE SKINS 

— the home. Yet those who have missed this 
means because not born in Christian homes 
must be converted, or there will never be a 
regenerated humanity. For them there are two 
other agencies — the revival and the Sunday 
school. Concerning the first I expect to show 
that the charge that it has seemed to lose power, 
and that its good effects are not such as abide, 
rests on sufficient reasons. At present it is 
a bruised reed, not broken nor to be broken, 
but of itself quite inadequate even with its 
former basis revised and with its former methods 
readjusted to extend or even maintain at their 
present strength the churches, should they de- 
pend on it chiefly. But with such revision and 
readjustment it may yet have great efficiency, as 
under the preacher it becomes an adjunct and 
coadjutor to the Sunday school. The latter, it 
will be shown, may be expected to develop into 
the grand gospel method of the future. 

THE REVIVAL 

Among Protestants generally the word "re- 
vival " no longer means only the return to life of a 
moribund church, but especially the bringing into 
the church of converts then first made alive. In 
this sense of the word revivals have been regarded 
by many churches as practically the only method 
of augmenting the number of Christians. And 
the sentiment is uttered as though it were an 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 251 

axiom, that, if revival methods fail, an end of 
churches will follow and future generations will 
be infidel. 

That revivals have greatly declined in fre- 
quency seems to be undeniable. Dr. Pentecost, 
one of the most efficient of living revivalists, is 
reported to have said, "The Moody revival is a 
spent force." The united testimony of the 
bishops of the Methodist church declare the same 
to be approximately true of the Methodist revival. 
A meeting of representative Christian workers in 
Montreal bears witness that the " after-meeting " 
has lost its power. The more influential religious 
journals have expressed opinions like this from 
The Watchman of Boston: "The revival in the 
sense of machinery for producing certain spiritual 
results probably has gone." The churches seem 
to have endorsed this verdict, for it is reported 
that the association which formerly advertised to 
furnish to order revivalists adapted to any com- 
munity and the purse of any church, has few 
calls, and many of its workers have become 
pastors or betaken themselves to other callings. 
The question that many ask with solicitude if not 
despair is, "Can the old-time prevalence and 
efficiency of the revival be restored?" With 
reference to this matter it should be understood, 
more generally than it appears to be, that the 
decline of desire and effort to promote great re- 
vivals is not because Christians have apostasized 



252 &(EJV WINE SKINS 

from Christ, lost interest in their fellow-men or 
faith in the Gospel. Doubtless it is admitted 
among all intelligent and progressive Christians 
that the average of Christian life and service is 
far below what it ought to be, yet he has failed 
to understand the past or to interpret the present 
justly who does not know that, with all its de- 
fects, a better quality of piety distinguishes 
Christendom in this generation than in any other 
that has lived. 

Christianity is a force in the world that will 
continue to evangelize. If a method that has 
been thought best should be superseded by an- 
other, it would be but a repetition of what has 
happened before with good results. Revivals of 
some kind, however, will recur so long as work- 
ing churches exist. Their principle is apostolic 
and in accord with human nature, which cannot, 
amid the great variety of objects for thought and 
action, be at all times equally and supremely 
interested in any one enterprise, however impor- 
tant. But it is necessary that Christians should 
at some time and in some way be supremely 
interested for the salvation of their fellow-men. 
If, therefore, "the revival as machinery," the 
revival as the past has known it, is gone, and 
cannot be restored, it must be because progress 
in knowledge is disclosing some need of improve- 
ment in the machinery that will leave the old 
unused, as the fireplace and crane, indispen- 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 253 

sable as they were in the homes of our ancestors, 
have given place to inventions that perform their 
service better. A conclusion that the revival 
methods of the past need to be similarly replaced 
and that a restoration to their former repute is 
impossible, seems to be warranted by various 
facts. 

In the first place, the revival methods have 
depended for their success largely upon the 
enthusiasm of crowds, and the general and pro- 
longed concentration of attention of the uncon- 
verted. Both these conditions are now rarely 
attainable. Every community has abundance of 
non-Christian people, but their attendance at 
revival meetings and their concentration of 
attention, especially in large and intelligent 
communities, is not secured. One reason is the 
multiplicity of other things that preoccupy atten- 
tion. Formerly the themes of public interest 
were few. After the struggle for daily bread, 
always paramount, religion, when once attention 
was called to it, had few rivals in the claim for 
thought. Of reading there was little; no tele- 
graph, no associated press, no engrossing news 
from the antipodes to furnish themes of thought 
and discussion, and easily would the revival be- 
come the one thing attracting and concentrating 
attention, and heightening interest by day-after- 
day presentation of subjects of supreme moment. 

How different is all this to-day ! The revival 



254 WEIV WINE SKINS 

meetings are competed with by the clubs, by the 
meetings of lodges — their festivals and their 
excursions, by the discussions and socials in the 
grange, or the popular amusements demanding 
more nights than the week affords. Now the 
evangelist finds not only rival claimants for atten- 
tion, but confident antagonists. One of these is 
the literature that in magazines and novels of all 
grades, in books upon socialism and hosts of other 
"isms," and in the daily, the weekly, and the 
mammoth Sunday newspapers, storms and drifts 
over all the country. 

The modern intensity of school life and of 
social life, the white heat of business competition, 
and more often than formerly the fever of pas- 
sion, unite to harden character into permanent 
forms in very early life. And, where no moral or 
religious training accompanies these early influ- 
ences, the young man and woman have usually 
chosen the hostile side. They are not, as young 
people formerly were, living with an expectation 
or desire that the revival may bring them into 
the church. The associations they have chosen 
perhaps include some labor organization, or some 
business whose leaders advise them to shun the 
church as an enemy. 

Multitudes appear to think that their supreme, 
perhaps their only, interest is in this life; and 
that the churches concern themselves entirely 
with the next. Hence they imagine that between 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 255 

them and the churches no point of contact exists, 
and that the church's message ignores more truth 
than it brings, and is therefore not worth hearing. 

How else can one reasonably account for the 
vast difference between the attendance on Mr. 
Moody's meetings in 1873 to l %77 an ^ those held 
since 1893, in which the audiences were said to 
consist almost entirely of church members? 

A brother furnishes me the following facts, 
gathered chiefly from the published Minutes of 
the Maine Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. They would probably be paralleled in 
the churches of any denomination where revivals 
employing similar methods have occurred. 

He says: " Some years before I was pastor at 
there was a revival, and ninety-four per- 
sons were taken on probation into the Methodist 
church. The records showed that only ten of 
these were ever taken into full membership." 
Between 1894 and 1898 the circuit or pastorate of 

and was reported as enjoying a 

series of " remarkable revivals." The pastor 
had employed the usual revival methods. The 
number of converts in the largest revival was 
seventy, the aggregate three hundred. Before 
the "great revival" occurred, the church num- 
bered, according to my informant, one hundred 
members. In 1894 the pastor's salary of #425 
was paid in full without missionary aid, and $45 
for various benevolences. But in the year fol- 



256 WEIV WINE SKINS 

lowing the "great revival/' the same salary was 
paid only with the help of $75 missionary 
money. In 1898 the succeeding pastor found a 
church of one hundred and eight full members ! 
The benevolent contributions were a few dollars 
more than in 1894, and the pastor's salary was 
$525; but it was not all paid; there was a defi- 
ciency of $ 50. Where are all those converts ? 
What did they ever do for the church or for the 
kingdom of God? What were they converted 
from, and what were they converted to ? 

Looking over the statistics of a list of churches 
that in 1894 reported revivals with from twenty- 
four to a hundred converts, my informant says : 
"An examination of these charges to-day does 
not reveal any strength as a result of these re- 
ported conversions ; in fact, these churches, 
many of them, are losing rather than gaining." 

In one well attested instance in this State, 
when the revivalist left, the names of ninety 
persons had been enrolled as wishing to lead a 
Christian life, but not one of them became a per- 
manent addition to the church, nor so far as 
believed to any church ! Doubtless many of 
them were still in the community, to be again 
reported as converts in the next revival. These 
may be extreme cases, but they sample the 
results of a certain method of evangelization, and 
they prove that "getting up a revival " may do 
very little for the salvation of men. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 257 

Will the "great revivals " of the cities exhibit 
in general better results than those above noted 
from the country? This city (Lewiston) has had 
five or six in the last forty years. The one of 
them that is still mentioned as making substantial 
additions to the churches is the first of the series 
conducted by Mr. Hammond, the worker among 
the children. And the last two — one of which 
stirred the whole city — passed like a transient 
fever, leaving the churches to doubt whether the 
general religious health was improved or not by 
the experience. 

A writer in the Christian Advocate has gath- 
ered the following facts respecting the wonderful 
meetings held for three months in Boston in 1877, 
under the direction of Mr. Dwight L. Moody. 
From five thousand to ten thousand conversions 
were reported. Many joined churches within 
one year ; but what became of the majority, and 
what was the effect on the permanent effective- 
ness of the churches? "The net gain in mem- 
bership in churches engaged in that revival for 
five years before the Moody meetings was 4,686. 
Net gain for five years after and including the 
year of those meetings was 2,576; that is, only 
55 per cent of the gain during five years before 
these meetings. The churches, roused by arti- 
ficial and extraordinary stimulation, attempted to 
compass in three months the work of years, and 



258 SV£ W PVINE SKINS 

when the protracted mental and nervous strain 
was past, sank back like one in nervous prostra- 
tion. 

The opinion has been expressed that Mr. 
Moody, taught by experience, could not have 
been induced in later life to enter upon any sim- 
ilar effort. His work became rather an effort to 
instruct Christians, and rouse them to continuous 
individual and organized activity for others. 

This meagerness of results of revivals and the 
transient nature of these results are facts requir- 
ing an explanation quite as much as the decline 
in the frequency of revivals. Doubtless the 
causes of both are the same, and the probable 
causes are so many that it is not reasonable to 
assume we have solved the problem by the 
wholesale assertion, "The churches have lost 
their spirituality "; indeed it is not at all certain 
that a large gain in spirituality would not itself 
lead to dissatisfaction with the old type of revival. 

Certain external reasons have been given for 
the revival's loss of prestige. There are others in 
the revival itself, not necessarily and always 
present, but in greater or less degree common, 
and often regarded as indispensable. One of 
these is the prominence it has given to the Old 
Testament conception of God, rather than to 
Christ's representation of him. The language in 
which the former was conveyed was borrowed 
from that applied to earthly sovereigns as the 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 259 

Jews knew them and thought it right for them to 
behave. It therefore represented God not only 
as absolute sovereign, but as one whose subjects 
were always disobedient, incurring his anger, and 
liable at any time to a stroke of his vengeance. 
No doubt this view, preached with utmost sin- 
cerity, produced great effect in multitudes of 
revivals beside that historic one that began from 
the sermon of Jonathan Edwards on "Sinners in 
the Hands of an Angry God," whose cold and 
pitiless logic led the minister sitting behind the 
preacher to pull his coat and cry out, "Mr. Ed- 
wards, isn't God a God of mercy? " 

Closely associated with this is another doctrinal 
view, still a staple in much revival preaching, 
that represents the divine sovereign as so despotic 
that he will not, or his government so imperfect 
that it cannot, allow the forgiveness of a repent- 
ant prodigal till his Elder Brother has borne an 
equivalent of pain which pays the government 
for all that would have been inflicted on the prod- 
igal had he never repented — making God an 
exacting despot who never forgives, but sells 
pardon ! 

Strange that such a monstrous conception, 
formed by men in an age when love and mercy in 
human sovereigns were unknown, should survive 
so long after the explicit teaching of Jesus that 
the Father forgives "freely,"* making no exac- 

*Matt. 18:21-35. 



260 ViElV WINE SKINS 

tion that any one should pay, and requires that 
our mercy should be of the same free and benev- 
olent kind;t authorizing us in our daily prayer to 
expect from him unpurchased pardon, if we can 
so " forgive our debtors." Sinners need forgive- 
ness ; for this the Father requires no condition 
but that they turn from sin with choice to do his 
will. They also need assurance of forgiveness ; 
this he gives through the testimony of his love as 
manifested supremely in the death of Christ. 
But they need more than this. They need to be 
awakened to a true ideal of life, so that they may 
repent; need to be awakened to love, so that 
they may loyally serve ; and for this the love-life 
and the love-death of Christ afford motive, en- 
couragement, and inspiration. The substitution 
of this glorious conception for the old forensic 
notion takes away the legal terms that revivalists 
were wont to conjure with, but it makes the per- 
sonality and teaching of Christ and his sacrifice 
of himself far more potent realities to those who 
aim to live the life of the Spirit, and to " put on 
Christ." 

A third characteristic of revival preaching that 
has doubtless won many to swell the roll of re- 
ported converts gave the impression that to be 
saved from sin means merely to be saved from 
the penalty of sin; the penitent had only to 
believe that Christ has fully borne his penalty, 

t Matt. 6 : 14. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 261 

and he is "saved to the uttermost,' ' because he 
has the benefit of some mysterious transaction 
done in heaven "long time ago." From such 
preaching the belief is inculcated that to be 
"saved" is to accept from without a gift; that 
religion is something to get, ready-made, from 
above. Once throngs flocked to such preaching, 
eager to get something for nothing. 

But when all people are taught that conversion 
is the soul's act turning itself to God in response 
to solicitation from him ; that his solicitations 
reach receptive minds in an almost infinite variety 
of ways ; that we become Christians, not by 
believing any abstract statement of doctrine nor 
any number of such statements, but by affec- 
tionate trust in the personality of God that dis- 
poses us to do his will in imitation of his divine 
Son; and that "experiencing religion" means 
transformation of character into the likeness of 
Christ, gradually wrought through our cooperation 
with the ever-present Spirit of God who works 
in us, — converts supposed to be made Christians 
in a moment will be fewer, but the number of 
intelligent Christians will not be less. 

Another stimulant for increasing the number of 
converts is remembered by people who heard the 
preaching and the exhortations in the annual 
revivals of forty years ago, and recall how full 
they were of death-bed scenes and entreaties to 
young and old to get ready to die. Young con- 



262 ViElV WINE SKINS 

verts, though children, would catch the prevailing 
phraseology, and exhort their young companions 
to forsake the vanities of this life, because they 
too might soon die. If revivals were thus helped 
to gather numbers — and who can doubt it? — they 
must lack that help now. Does anybody want 
to go back to that cant even if the preaching of 
the present day is less favorable to excitement? 
Is it not better that preachers should teach as 
they now do, that religion is for the life that 
now is as well as for that which is to come, and 
that to be spiritually alive is to live through the 
tasks and associations of every day in loyal obe- 
dience to the Christian law of love to God and 
man? 

A belief has commonly prevailed in revivals, 
often seeming to be the basal doctrine, that emo- 
tional excitement is the proof of the presence of 
God, and that happy feelings are the substance 
or "power of religion.' ' This once made the 
excitements called "great revivals " easy to pro- 
duce, but worthless in their effects. Then the 
recipe for producing them was substantially this, 
as given by a famous revivalist of fifty years 
ago: " First shake sinners over hell till they are 
terrified; then show them that Jesus bore the 
penalty for their guilt, and if they will believe it 
they may shout, * Hallelujah, 'tis done.' " 

Doubtless there are communities and parts of 
the country where this kind of revival will be 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 263 

long in going, where " mourners " will be brought 
to the anxious seat by lurid descriptions of ever- 
lasting burnings of physical bodies in a lake of 
fire — such as a Western evangelist not long ago 
employed, describing the lake as the molten 
center of our planet, whose flames appear in the 
fires of our volcanoes, or as appeared in the ser- 
mon which so frightened Georgie Howe in "The 
Bonnie Brier Bush"; which is no exaggeration of 
what I myself heard from a famous evangelist 
now living. This literalizing of the symbols of 
Scripture is not now possible for Christian work- 
ers who are wise, nor would people be willing to 
hear it; not because people generally are too 
fastidious to hear the truth and the whole truth, 
when they are given nothing but the truth ; nei- 
ther is it because the consequences of sin are less 
terrible and inevitable facts than the figures used 
by our Lord represent. 

But the truth is, that punishments come only 
because as natural consequences they must, not 
because the Father is vindictive. If men choose 
to be out of harmony with him and with the con- 
ditions of their own welfare, not even his infinite 
love can prevent their misery. He wishes the 
well-being of all his children. He works for it in 
every way by which wisdom or power can pro- 
mote such an end. True religion will gain, when 
all sinners are taught that every man makes his 
own hell, and that the only salvation consists in 



264 tKEW IVINE SKINS 

harmony of will and affection with the love and 
will of God. Then men will cease to seek a 
religion to be put on them, ready-made, as a charm 
against hell torments, and the kind of revival 
that makes "getting happy" the substance of 
religion or the chief sign of its presence will 
altogether disappear. Indeed, it is the elimina- 
tion of this method of evangelization already 
taking place that has caused much of the fear 
expressed lest "soul-saving" were "becoming a 
lost art." This kind of revival declines because 
people advance in knowledge both of the laws of 
mind and of the purpose of the gospel ; because 
they have learned that no transition from fear to 
joy, nor any other feeling, is certain evidence of 
conversion ; because the value of a feeling is in 
the results to which it leads. Its value cannot be 
known till its results are seen. 

People are now sure that God does not speak 
to us so directly in our emotions as in our 
thoughts ; that emotion is always secondary — 
that feelings rise out of our intellectual activities ; 
that they come with exciting thoughts, whether 
the thoughts are true or imaginary; and thus many 
strong emotional experiences are attributed to the 
Holy Spirit that are from quite different sources. 
We draw near to God in our thoughts before we 
can in our emotions. We draw near to him far 
more in our wills when in the absence of all 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 265 

emotion — save such as comes with the thought 
of God and is spiritual sympathy with him — we 
will to be in harmony with his will. 

Have we not found sufficient reason for the 
present decline of the revival in its inexact the- 
ology, its unwarranted symbolism, its false con- 
ception of what conviction, conversion, and a 
saved person are? But what will be its future? 

When the first transatlantic cable was laid, 
and messages were conveyed under the ocean 
from continent to continent, almost boundless ex- 
pectations were aroused. These anticipations 
were destined to be realized, not however by that 
first cable. Its efficiency at length began to de- 
cline. The electrical current was redoubled, but 
this, instead of restoring its efficacy, only showed 
more plainly the existence of defect and hastened 
its total failure. The like fate seems to be over- 
taking the old-time revival. Between the time 
of Whitefield and now, seasons have been when 
to bring the whole nation into the kingdom of 
Christ seemed easy. The anticipation will be 
realized, but the indications are that it will be 
by other methods, not those that roused the ex- 
pectation. An attempt to increase to its former 
efficiency the old machinery unchanged will only 
make its inadequacy more apparent, and hasten 
its removal. 

But it may be said those imperfect conceptions 
of doctrine and crudities of method that have 



266 ViEW WINE SKINS 

given form to the revival hitherto and are per- 
petuated in its results, are now an outgrown 
inheritance from the past, and may soon be only 
a disused heirloom. Their place will be taken by 
better statements of doctrine and fitter methods, 
and the work of evangelization will go on as 
rapidly as it has ever been reasonable to hope. 
This we may believe. But as the promise of the 
first cable was fulfilled only in others, so when 
the revival shall have been fully adjusted to the 
needs of the time and the present work of race 
redemption, it will have become another, or 
rather, like each ocean cable of to-day a part of a 
grand system of methods, doing a greater work, 
and performing it better than those who thought 
the old methods perfect could imagine. 

Among the reasons for believing this, is the 
wide-spread and growing conviction that the re- 
vival alone does not and cannot yield the kind of 
churches and of Christians on whom the world's 
evangelization may safely depend. It is true 
that many Christians of the noblest character and 
service have come into the churches in revivals, 
and perhaps in some communities and denomina- 
tions the majority. That has certainly been true 
in past times. The explanation is, that was the 
prevailing method ; the revival was the only time 
when the door into the church was thought of as 
open, and all persons conformed to the universal 
expectation. Besides, it is generally found that 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 267 

Christians of this kind have become converts in 
early life, or had received early training under 
the influence of some Christian teacher in home, 
in school, or in Sunday school. This fact, there- 
fore, is no proof that the revival is still an ade- 
quate methed, or even a good one. 

THE METHODS OF THE FUTURE. 

In this discussion of the methods of evangeliza- 
tion it is assumed that the Scriptures are the 
evangel itself. From them every method derives, 
or at least claims, its sanction. The methods of 
successive ages have yielded richer blessings as 
one after another they have brought the Script- 
ures into the thought and life of men. Wicliffe 
was the Morning Star of the Reformation because 
he released the Scriptures from their prison in 
dead languages ; Tyndal made reformation possi- 
ble because he fulfilled his vow to make the plow- 
boys acquainted with the Scriptures. "Back to 
the Bible ! " was Luther's war-cry. " Back to 
pentecost and the apostles ! " became the watch- 
word after Wesley's time. " Back to Christ ! " 
has been the motto of the last decade. But the 
movement in all this time has been a forward and 
upward one. 

A better knowledge and a wider use of the 
Scriptures have been accompanied by better 
modes of evangelization. Interest in the study of 
the Scriptures was never so intense or so uni- 
versal as now. It is difficult to realize under 



268 V^EIV WINE SKINS 

how much greater light than ever before the 
study is prosecuted. It is becoming more and 
more evident that stable faith and large useful- 
ness are found chiefly in those who, like Paul and 
Timothy, knew the Scriptures from their youth. 
More and more will the Scriptures be not a fetich 
nor a talisman, but the evangel in the methods of 
the future. The Church will evangelize by 
teaching all persons, so far as possible, what the 
Scriptures are, and the best conception yet at- 
tained of the truth they convey. At the same 
time this work will not be accomplished except 
by the power of personality — by lives that illus- 
trate the ideals and the commandments of Jesus. 
And this work must begin when education and 
the formation of character naturally begin, at the 
threshold of life. This indeed places the primary 
responsibility on the home, a responsibility which 
only the Christian home can fulfil. A long time 
ago, when Sunday schools were unknown, Baxter 
said that " parents' godly instruction and educa- 
tion of their children is God's first means of 
grace," and that " public preaching is appointed 
for the conversion of those only who have missed 
the blessing of this first appointed means." 

Cotton Mather, the most devout and scholarly 
of the Puritan divines, may almost be said to 
have prophesied of the Sunday school, when in- 
sisting that unless the benefits of the " church 
dispensations " were shared by the children the 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 269 

church would " die . . . a lingering death." He 
said, "The Lord hath not set up churches only 
that a few old Christians may keep one another 
warm while they live, and then carry away the 
church with them when they die, no, but that 
they might with all care and with all advantages 
to that care that may be, nurse still successively 
another generation of subjects to our Lord that 
may stand up in his kingdom when they are 
gone." 

But he was thinking only of perpetuating the 
church through the children of Christian parents, 
believing there was for them a special grace 
which the faithfulness of parents might secure. 
With the church of New England in his day 
there was no question of general evangelization, 
only the perpetuation of a church of the elect. 
Nor does the church yet realize its full responsi- 
bility and privilege in reference to those children 
that are not born into Christian homes ; nor do 
such homes all of them realize their almost 
boundless power over the welfare of the children 
given them to rear. Among the means which 
the church as such employs, the most effective 
is the Sunday school ; and that hitherto has been 
but a Cinderella — a stepdaughter — among the 
church's activities. But important truths have 
come to light tending to show that she will yet 
enter into her birthright as queen of them all. 



270 tKElV WINE SKINS 

But indifferently fostered as the Sunday school 
has been, it is admitted that eighty-five per cent of 
the additions to Protestant churches are brought 
in through the Sunday school, and that a large 
majority of the remaining fifteen per cent are won 
because seeds of Christian truth were planted in 
their minds, and some dawn of religious con- 
sciousness secured in early years. If now by 
any means the instructions and personal influ- 
ences of the ideal Sunday school can steadily 
reach all children, will not the work of evangeli- 
zation have a success never yet enjoyed, until 
the Harlan Pages and even the pulpit will be but 
gleaners in the harvest field? 

Even the revival may be regenerated ; with its 
crudities ripened or eliminated, it may be pre- 
pared for in the church and observed as the semi- 
annual " feast of ingathering.* ' This is not a 
dream ; it is the expectation warranted by the 
effect of a method now in operation, and by the 
trend that is manifested in the present life and 
work of the most fruitful churches ; and espe- 
cially by the laws for the formation of character, 
and the principles of education as now under- 
stood. 

These principles are not new ; they are woven 
by the loom of God in the constitution of man : 
the all-comprehensive teaching of Jesus is in 
accord with them ; they are universally recog- 
nized as applicable to the preparation of every 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 271 

child for the social, the domestic, the business life 
he is to live. One of them is enunciated as a 
rule with no exceptions when we say "the 
child is father of the man." We understand by 
it that in the years of child-life, the years of play 
and study, a trend is given to the whole life'; that 
as the arrow gets the direction and the mo- 
mentum of its entire course while it lies on the 
bow touched by the string, so often while he lies 
in the lap of the mother the child receives the 
beginnings of impulse and aspiration that give him 
both the aim of his life and the force by which 
at last he reaches his mark. When any person 
achieves some unusual success in the world of 
science or letters, or is selected to receive dis- 
tinguished responsibility and honor, we point 
our children to the characteristics of his childhood 
or youth that are the secret of his success ; and 
we tell them that no person who defers till youth 
is past his preparation for business, for social 
position, or public trust, can ever be thoroughly 
successful, or ever cease to regret the loss of his 
youth. Why is it, then, that Christians have not 
treated the period of childhood and youth as of as 
much importance for the religious life as for the 
social or economic? Why has it been the practi- 
cal belief of the church that children must live 
the first years of their lives in disloyalty to God? 
Why is it not possible to think, and to have the 
children think, that they are, and are to continue, 



272 V(EIV WWE SKINS 

loyal to the kingdom of heaven as well as to their 
home and to the State into whose citizenship 
they are born? Why not think that the period 
of childhood and youth are more important as the 
time of preparation for building Christian charac- 
ter than for any other human interest? For, do 
we not observe that those uses of faculty that are 
most delicate and most highly esteemed can 
never be acquired with complete success except 
by those who begin their training in youth or 
infancy? No one, so far as is known, has ever 
shown what could be achieved by a musician, by 
a sculptor, by a painter, unless he was associated 
with great masters, and began his training in 
childhood or youth. Is not the formation of the 
character of an immortal spirit and a prepara- 
tion for service in the kingdom of heaven through 
helping to train other spirits, a work second to no 
other in delicacy or in importance? And has not 
experience shown that those who begin late in 
life are usually bunglers? It would seem that the 
natural way to enter any kingdom worth possess- 
ing is to go in as a little child. It was a universal 
law which our Saviour announced when he said 
the children belong to the kingdom of heaven,* 
and only they and such as enter it as they can f 
— as open-minded receptive learners — can " see 
the kingdom." 



* Matt. 19 : 14 ; Mark 10 : 14. 
t Matt. 18 : 3 ; Mark 10 : 15. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 212, 

If the disciples failed, as the Church has failed 
since, to understand their Lord it was owing to 
the preoccupation of their minds by a prejudice 
inherited from ages of ignorance that extended 
into the long past, in which it had been written 
that children were " conceived in sin and shapen 
in iniquity," going " astray speaking lies as soon 
as they were born." How else could it be when 
all parents were iniquitous, and all children were 
born into an environment of liars? But these 
were simply historic statements of facts. And 
these facts that were contrary to the plan of God 
were mistaken for revelations of that plan. And 
this mistake has persisted until on the words of 
Jesus and the nature of man the new lights of 
the nineteenth century have been turned. 

Down to the first half of the century it was 
taught that every child's " nature is sin and that 
sin is guilt" to be punished; that the "very 
best actions " of this guilty being are in God's 
sight "polluted and loathsome" because, on 
account of the first man's sin, every child is 
" born accursed absolutely and totally." " This," 
says Bishop Huntington, " was preached with 
learning, logic, and as much pictorial luridness as 
the preacher's imagination could supply." * 

The eyes of the Church are hardly adjusted yet 
to the light which has dissipated this darkness 



* " Persuasives to Early Piety." American Tract Society, 18 
Shedd. Lectures. " Christian Pastor," p. 339. 



274 tKEW IVINE SKINS 

and its nightmare ; when they are fully open she 
will see a new force in our Lord's command, 
" Permit the children to come unto me." Not 
that we shall be seeing new truths any more 
than it is a new sun we greet after a long period 
of cloud and fog. But we shall see new applica- 
tions of the laws of child nature and educational 
growth to the work of evangelizing our country 
and the world. The epoch-making discoveries of 
the last century were not a discovery of new 
substances nor forces ; iron, water, and lightning 
are realities as old as the world ; but the new ap- 
plications of them as steel, steam, and electricity 
have revolutionized the business methods of the 
world. Could we be sure that the Church would 
soon be as wise to see, and as eager to improve 
her possibilities, as the business world has been, 
we could anticipate that the industrial progress 
of the nineteenth century would be paralleled by 
the religious and moral development of the 
twentieth. 

Great illumination has come to many minds 
when they have received the truth — taught indeed 
by Paul and by Jesus himself — that God is always 
working. He puts forth his power not merely at 
rare crises like the moment of conversion, but he is 
ever working through natural forces by means and 
agents physical and spiritual. The child is not 
so much a power as a possibility, and is no more 
incomplete in one aspect of his being than an- 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 275 

other. As a social being he can be fully de- 
veloped only in society ; as an observing and 
practical being, only in contact with nature ; as a 
moral being, only in contact with the rights and 
needs of his fellow-men and all sentient ex- 
istence ; as a religious being, only in recognition 
of God and in the society of godly people ; and 
the time and the manner of his development in 
all these respects are determined according to the 
same general laws. The application of the law 
of growth to religious development is possible 
only because every person is born with a religious 
constitution — with a capacity and a need to be- 
come religious ; and so far as the nature of 
children has been studied, this constitution 
inclines them to religion that demands, and 
when developed leads to, morality and hero- 
ism such as accord with the Christian ideals. 
The doctrine that children have a naturally 
Christian mind is not new, since Tertullian 
taught it seventeen centuries ago. When our 
Saviour said of the children, " Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven," he was teaching that they 
are " endowed with a natural affinity for the 
things of the kingdom." * 

This does not mean that children are born 
Christians, but neither are they born reprobates 
nor even sinners, just as no child is born an 



* Van Oostersee's " Practical Theology," pp. 467-8 Quoted in " The 
Christian Pastor,"' p. 338. 



276 &(EIV WINE SKINS 

orator, a scholar, a judge, or even a man. He is 
simply a nucleus of possibilities that in favorable 
surroundings will develop into an individual fitted 
for service, and just as naturally also into the 
highest type of man, the Christ's man. Of this 
truth the author of " The Reformed Pastor " had 
more than a glimpse years ago,t for he affirms 
that by the faithfulness of those to whose care 
children are committed they may so receive the 
blessings of a " holy education " that they will 
never become " actual ungodly persons," but 
will become so acquainted with Christ that they 
will choose to please him " as soon as they arrive 
at full natural capacity." On the other hand, he 
says: " Ungodly parents do serve the devil so 
effectually in the first impressions on their chil- 
dren's minds, that it is more than magistrates 
and ministers and all reforming means can after- 
wards do to recover them from sin to God. 
Whereas if their hearts were first turned to 
God by a religious education, piety would then 
have all those advantages that sin hath now." 

What of conversion? If children can be started 
towards Christian character from the cradle, is 
conversion left out? Certainly not. Conversion 
or regeneration is a turning-point, a crisis, that 
finds place at some time in every normally de- 
veloped character. There is a natural order for 
the various stages of moral and religious growth 

t Bushnell's " Christian Nurture," p. 59. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 277 

as there is for the stages of intellectual growth — 
God's "set time." He has fixed it in the hu- 
man constitution. As there is a natural need and 
a natural capacity in every child for acquiring 
language very early, and after that a natural 
time for beginning the observation of nature, her 
forms, her life, and her beauty, so there is a 
natural time to think of and reverence the unseen 
Companion, who is in and behind all nature. At 
that time every well-born child who is in intimate 
association with personalities that are amiable, 
wise, and good begins his religious development. 
Later will come the period when he can intelli- 
gently make choice, or perhaps ratify and inter- 
pret an earlier choice, of the goal of his life — the 
person whom he will serve, and the means by 
which he will seek the perfection of his being. If 
he still has the advice and inspiration of persons 
of Christian wisdom and friendship the right 
choice will certainly be made, for it is but one 
more step in a course already begun, as natural a 
part of it as the flowering of a plant is a natural 
part of the plant. 

Paul's conversion, with all its unique features, 
and the transformed life that followed it, was no 
exception. It is evident that he had inherited 
the spiritual foundation for an energetic and in- 
fluential personality. He had early learned to 
regard the will of God, to obey his conscience 
always as in God's sight. When he reached the 



278 WEIV WIKE SKINS 

point of turning, the question for him was not 
whether to break off life-long habits of known 
wrong-doing, but whether to continue to live 
conscientiously now that new light has shown 
him that another road and not the one he is on is 
the right one. His previous training had pre- 
pared him to be obedient to the heavenly vision. 

Some still ask, Can there be any method by 
which God working through men can redeem the 
race from the savage triumph of selfishness that 
on every hand threatens society, caring not for 
the immorality of the means, nor for the persons 
by whose undoing it prospers? For ages many 
have wished and expected some sudden display 
of almighty power, apart from all means, that 
shall annihilate all bad men and all bad passions 
remaining in good men, and create at once a 
regenerated humanity. 

When the great revival that began under the 
preaching of Jonathan Edwards was in progress 
he regarded it as the beginning of the new era 
when the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh. 
But years after, he records his disappointment, 
comparing the promise and the result to a tree 
covered with blossoms, only a few of which are 
succeeded by fruit.* Now centuries of study of 
God's operations in nature and in grace have 
shown us that a sudden and magical creation of a 
state of society is not his method. He no more 

* " Christian Nurture," p. 167. 



METHODS OF EVANGELIZATION 279 

makes a renovated nation by a fiat — nor even his 
noblest work, a Christian man "who can stand 
four square to every wind that blows " — than he 
makes instantly a tree tall, straight, and strong, 
fit to be a mast and hold its sail against a hurri- 
cane. 

Divine grace working with natural and human 
means does transform characters already mature. 
It can change a heathen priest into a Christian 
missionary, a Jerry McAuley from a vile criminal 
to a loving rescuer of vicious men. But the chief 
hope for our race does not arise in that direction. 
A captain who had sent out several boats' crews 
to rescue persons driven into the water from a 
sinking ship, frequently, as he saw the rescuers 
dive into the water after one who had gone down, 
had to shout, " Save those that are still swim- 
ming!" Hitherto effort has been concentrated 
chiefly on those already sunk in indifference, 
unbelief, or hostility. Bestowed upon the children 
it will be more fruitful a thousand-fold. Dr. J. 
Wilbur Chapman once asked, in an audience of 
five thousand persons, that all who had accepted 
Christ between the ages of fifty and sixty would 
rise, and only four stood, but when he asked that 
all who had accepted Christ between the ages 
of ten and twenty would rise " it seemed as if 
the entire audience was standing." 

Other pastors beside Dr. Chapman are per- 
ceiving that when our Sunday schools become 



280 NEIV WWE SKINS 

" what God would have them be " our children 
" will come as naturally into the kingdom of God 
as the sun rises in the morning, " and teachers in 
the Sunday schools will labor with the same con- 
fidence that their pupils will be loyal to Jesus 
that the teachers in our public schools now have 
that theirs will be loyal to the flag that floats 
over the schoolhouse. 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 
OF TO-DAY 

BY 

REV. CHARLES M. SHELDON, A. M. f 

Pastor of the Central Congregational Church, 

Topeka, Kansas 

Author of " In His Steps," etc. 



Opportunities before the Church of 
To-day 



When my father began his ministry in New 
York State about fifty years ago, he faced certain 
conditions in the ministry and the church which 
are quite different from those which confront us 
to-day. In the first place, his ministry, as such, 
was quite well defined for him. He knew, with 
a certain definiteness, which might have been 
written out like a daily program, just what he 
was expected to do as a minister, and what his 
church was expected to be as a church. He 
knew, within certain clearly defined limits, that 
he was expected to preach and to visit his people, 
and the church knew for itself that it was ex- 
pected to listen to preaching, and to be visited. 
It would not be fair to say that the limits of his 
office as minister were altogether defined by 
preaching and visiting. But in a certain true 
sense, the ministry was quite well bounded by 
the doings of these two things. Of course there 
were other duties incident to his calling, but it is 
fair to say that a large part of his time and 
strength went out in the doing of these two 
things. 



284 ${EW IVINE SKINS 

There was also another fact true of his ministry 
at the time he began his work, and that was the 
fact that his social surroundings were quite 
simple. It was not an age of organization. So- 
ciety was vastly more simple in its relations than 
it is at present. There were no great problems — 
at least not so far as furnishing subjects for 
preaching was concerned — like those which con- 
front us now. There was, of course, the one 
great question of slavery ; but the temperance 
question, the labor question, the race question, 
the housing problem, the servant-girl problem, the 
problem of municipal life, the relation of the 
church to complex social conditions — all these 
were practically unknown. They did not furnish 
subjects for my father's preaching. They were 
not in existence as they are to-day. 

There was another fact true of my father's 
time which is not so true of to-day, and that was 
the existence of a strong and narrow spirit of 
sectarianism. I think it is highly probable, if I 
were to look over his file of old sermons — sup- 
posing he has preserved them, which is exceed- 
ingly doubtful — I should find some in which he 
preached quite strongly upon reasons why it was 
best for everybody to be a Presbyterian — for 
that is the church in which he began his labors. 
And the man on the other side of the street, the 
same Sunday morning, was preaching on the 
subject of " Why it is best for everybody in th : s 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 285 

little village, and the world, to be a Baptist or a 
Congregationalism" That condition of denomi- 
national pride and narrowness furnished, in quite 
a large degree, the stock in trade for preaching 
material. But all that is changed within fifty 
years. 

There was also another condition which entered 
largely into the life of my father's time, and 
shaped more or less definitely his work in the 
ministry and the work in the church, and that 
was the simpler home life of his age. I can well 
remember that our home life remained sacredly 
intact as long as we were children, and it was 
father's custom never to sit down and begin any 
meal in the family until every child was present, 
in his place at the table. It was not an age of 
clubs, either for men or women. It was not an 
age when business cares and the hurry and haste 
of organized life had begun to rob the family of 
its just rights. I think it would be safe to say 
that in the village where my father began his 
pastorate, night after night, whole families could 
be found gathered together in a real family circle, 
in their own homes. There was no multiplicity 
of social engagements to take either father or 
mother or children away from their own hearth 
into the circle of some other man's family. 

I made the challenge, some time ago, to the 
people in my own city that, if they were to begin 
at one end of the handsomest residential street in 



286 tHElV IVINE SKINS 

the place, and knock at each door in turn, on any 
winter evening, and enter, they would not find 
one family in twenty together, as a family, 
spending the evening, on any night of the week. 
They would be in some other man's house, or 
the young people would be at some gathering of 
some club, literary or amusement. 

I do not know how other men feel concerning 
this apparent and also real loss of the simple 
home life which once, I am sure, characterized us 
as a people. For myself, I feel that it is very 
serious, like the loss out of our religious life of the 
habit of family worship ; and unless we can dis- 
cover something in our modern complex life 
which can come in to take its place as an equiva- 
lent, I am sure we are right to consider it as one 
of the great and serious questions facing us to-day 
as a people. Have we anything to correspond to 
that which we have lost out of our home life, as 
it used to exist in the simpler conditions which 
faced our fathers? 

There is also another fact true of my father's 
early ministry, which is not true of the ministry 
and church to-day, and that is the fact that there 
was really no young life in the church that was 
recognized or used as power. 

I have heard my father say that he entered the 
church himself, as a boy, with great fear and 
trembling, after he had been obliged to submit to 
a long list of theological and doctrinal questions, 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 287 

which no man on earth could possibly answer, 
much less a lad of sixteen. The church seemed 
to do everything in its power to make it as hard 
as possible for him to become a member. He 
was brought up to believe that it was his busi- 
ness as a boy to keep still in a religious gathering 
and listen to his elders. It never entered into 
the minister's mind to ask the young men and 
young women in his church to do anything in 
particular for the kingdom of God. And in like 
manner, when my father began his ministry — 
at least in the first part of it — I do not think it 
occurred to him to take the young men and young 
women in his parish and use them in ways of 
service. 

These things, then, form something of the pro- 
gram of my father's ministry fifty years ago — a 
well-defined if narrow definition of his life work 
and of the purpose of the church — to preach, to 
visit, to go to meeting, to go home again ; a 
simpler social organization making it in one sense 
easier for him to perform the duties of his profes- 
sion ; a home life which was a part of the religious 
need, and which in one sense was an equivalent 
for the absence of young life in the church itself ; 
the presence of a spirit of narrow and jealous 
sectarianism, which dominated a part of his 
preaching, and entered more or less strongly into 
the practices of his church members ; and an 



288 WEIV WINE SKINS 

absence of the power of organized youth, to do 
service in practical ways through and by the 
church as an organization. 

Contrast conditions of to-day with those of fifty 
years ago. We find that the ministry of to-day 
cannot so well define the reason for its existence 
or its daily program of activity. I do not know 
myself, as far as I have gone, just what a minis- 
ter is. I know some things very well concerning 
my program in my profession, but concerning 
other duties I am not so clear in my own mind. 
I cannot draw an exact line around my profession 
and say, " Thus far and no farther.' ' It seems 
to me sometimes that I must be more things to 
more men than my father ever was, or than Paul 
ever was, in order to rise to the dignity of the 
profession which I have chosen, or which has 
been chosen for me. I know quite well the 
definiteness which surrounds my preaching. At 
least I am able to be dogmatic for myself concern- 
ing that, if not for other ministers. But I am not 
easily convinced as to all my personal work in 
the ministry, and when it comes to the work of 
my own church, I am not able to set about it 
hard and fast lines of limitation. In other words, 
I do not know that I could write out definitely and 
sharply, and satisfactorily to my own mind, ex- 
actly what is always the work of my own church. 

This lack of definiteness, however, does not 
puzzle me to the extent of hindering the work 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 289 

that I know to be well enough defined. It simply 
leaves my program for my own ministry and the 
service of my own church expansively open to 
new methods, and new applications of the Sermon 
on the Mount and the general teaching of Jesus. 1 
am glad it is not too hard and fast defined for me. 

The conditions which face my ministry to-day, 
and yours, are also, along the line of church 
federation, vastly different from and more helpful 
than those of fifty years ago. We no longer 
wear out our strength in telling our people why 
we are this or that sect. We have learned 
wisdom in learning to know and love one another, 
and there is nothing more hopeful in the whole 
ecclesiastical history of the world to-day than the 
fact that the churches are ready, as they never 
have been before, to see more of the Kingdom of 
God and its needs than of their own individual 
and sectarian life. 

The fact also that, in comparison with fifty 
years ago, our social conditions have changed 
from simple to complex, makes the work of the 
ministry and the church in a very large sense 
more interesting and more valuable than it used 
to be. We are obliged to take account of the 
problems that have resulted from the world's 
rapid growth. It is a splendid thing for us that 
our definition of the office of Christ in the world 
has enlarged, and if we do not lay as much stress 
now upon the value of the atonement to save the 



290 &CEJV WINE SKINS 

individual as my father did, we have not cheap- 
ened or lessened the power of the atonement 
because we insist that its work is social as well 
as individual. And if we find material to-day for 
our preaching in the needs of the community, or 
a class, or a special group of individuals, it is not 
because we do not believe that the atonement 
must work on individual men, one at a time, but 
because we believe it is the will of God that the 
redemption which Christ makes possible is a re- 
demption large enough to save socially, by saving 
individuals who are in social relations. 

The fact also that we live in an age of organi- 
zation, which may have stolen from us by degrees 
some of the sacred things belonging to family and 
home life, is not altogether a discouraging fact, if 
we remember that the organized life of to-day 
has drawn into active exercise a factor not known 
nor recognized fifty years ago in the young life of 
the time. And it is owing to this change or 
these new conditions which face us to-day that 
we are able to set before our ministry and our 
churches a very well defined program for activity. 

There are, therefore, certain opportunities 
facing us at this moment, so clearly known, so 
well defined, that we shall certainly miss the 
very reason for our existence as messengers of 
God, in pulpit and in pew, if we do not accept 
the opportunities which face us, and let faith and 
love and hope go on to do the work which God 
wants his people to do. 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 291 

I would like to mention in brief detail some 
opportunities which seem very clearly to offer 
themselves for the exercise of Christian energy 
in the ministry and the church of the present 
time, and the first of these great opportunities is 
the opportunity for the 

(i) UNION OF CHRISTENDOM 

It does not make very much difference whether 
we can agree upon a definite theological or doctri- 
nal statement in our different denominations. It 
is doubtful whether we shall ever be able to 
agree in any such dogma in the way of belief or 
creed. The great and essential thing is that we 
agree upon the need of a common humanity for 
the life which Jesus came into this world to give 
to all men alike. It might be an absolute im- 
possibility for five or six different denominations 
in the average town in the United States to 
agree upon any statement or statements, the- 
ologically. But it is within the reach of any 
such group of churches to-day to agree upon the 
common necessity of the human beings, in the 
towns where they all live, for a better life in this 
world, and redemption for the world to come. 

One of the most useful parts of my own 
parish work has consisted in the work which I 
have been able to do with the brother who is 
in the adjoining church of the Presbyterian 
denomination. We have, during different years, 
made our parish calls together, beginning at the 



292 V^EJV IVINE SKINS 

limits of our two parishes, which lie together, 
and calling in person on every family within 
the boundaries of the two parishes. I think 
that no one thing that either of us has been 
able to do in the way of parish work has ever 
accomplished quite so much in the way of 
unity as has this custom. It could be followed 
out successfully in hundreds of communities. 
The sight of two brethren of different denom- 
inations, going together through their parishes, 
inviting every man, woman, and child to come 
to 'service or to belong to some part of God's 
work, is a sight which will do more in a short 
time to break down denominational lines, and 
build up a true federation of Christ's disciples, 
than possibly any other one thing. If Chris- 
tendom does not come together in practical 
ways for the building up of God's kingdom, it 
cannot expect to succeed in individual churches 
in building up Christ's work. 

There is another meeting ground where all 
ministers and churches of to-day ought to be 
doing service for the Kingdom, and that is 
along the line of what is called 
(2) TEMPERANCE 

After a residence of twelve years in a 
Prohibition State, I am more and more con- 
vinced that there is no other way for the State 
to deal with the liquor business except to pro- 
hibit it altogether by law, and I think it is 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 293 

quite safe to say that the overwhelming major- 
ity of all the ministers and church members in 
the State of Kansas of all the different denomi- 
nations are in favor of retaining our law upon 
the statute books, and of continuing the policy 
which was begun nearly twenty years ago. 
This opinion is shared by the best men and 
women in the State, lawyers, editors, school 
teachers, and, to a large extent, the best 
business men. 

For myself, I do not see how the ministers 
of to-day, or the church of to-day, can either 
ignore this question, or pass it by with an 
occasional sermon, or go positively on record 
for license, either high or low, or any other 
form of compromise with a business which is 
sin. There is a solemn obligation laid upon 
every minister, and upon every church of 
Christ in the world to-day, to do its share, 
positively and fearlessly, in view of the tre- 
mendous evil flowing out of the entire drink 
business. To shirk our responsibility, or to 
ignore the question altogether, is to miss an 
opportunity of the time ! There is no moral 
question in America to-day which is equal to 
the question of "Saloon or No Saloon!" 
There is no one thing which is doing more to 
destroy the life and to sap the strength of 
the people than this monster of all the ages. 



294 WEIV WINE SKINS 

Instead of preaching a sermon on some 
doctrinal topic, it would be a good thing for 
every minister in the United States to take out 
of the daily papers he reads between two Sun- 
days all the accounts of crime and disorder 
which can be traced directly to drink. I did 
that once a little while ago, taking six daily papers, 
from average communities, and pasting the 
clippings together for six days. It made a roll, 
which, when unwound in the church, stretched 
clear across it. If I had had all the daily papers 
of all the world, from which to take these ex- 
tracts, I am confident I would have had 
enough, after recording all one week's crime 
and shame in the world directly traceable to 
drink, to paper the whole inside of my church, 
and the outside also. 

In view of all that we know concerning 
the effects of the liquor business, it is a mys- 
tery to me how the Church of Christ in the 
world is doing and saying so little about it. 
(3) CHRISTIAN BUSINESS 

There is also, under the conditions which 
face us to-day in the ministry and the church, 
a well defined program for the minister, — 
especially, in calling attention to the preva- 
lent dishonesty in the business world. This is 
a good place here to make what may seem to 
a good many people unfounded and wild 
charges against business methods and business 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 295 

integrity. It is not necessary to do anything 
of the kind in order to state the truth. Will 
the ministers of this city ask all the business 
men in their congregations to tell them, with 
an honesty which they will be obliged to ex- 
ercise at the day of judgment, how many 
business men in this city are conducting their 
business strictly on the teaching of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount or the Golden Rule ? I 
have asked several typical Christian business 
men recently, in Boston, to give me a fair 
answer to this question. One of them said he 
thought probably ten per cent of all the busi- 
ness men in Boston would be willing to take 
Christ as partner into their business without 
shame. Another said he thought a fair average 
would be two per cent, and the third man said 
he doubted whether one per cent would be will- 
ing to do such a thing. 

What shall we say of great business enter- 
prises which contradict the private life of the 
man or men who have brought them into 
existence ? 

For example, here are the owners of a 
great steamship line, owning and running sev- 
eral magnificent ocean liners, which cost any- 
where from a million to two million dollars 
each. They are magnificent examples of the 
skill and power of man, and make us admire 
the brain of the human being who can execute 



296 U^EW WINE SKINS 

such marvels of mechanical skill. The men 
who own and control these miracles of man's 
creative power are regarded as good Christian 
men in their homes ; they belong to the church ; 
they love their families ; they give large sums 
to church work, to hospitals, to philanthropic 
enterprises ; they pose as splendid examples of 
Christian business men at home. And yet 
these vessels which run between New York 
and Liverpool are floating saloons, filled with 
intoxicating drink. Men who would shudder 
at the thought of setting up a saloon and de- 
riving revenue from it on land, do not hesi- 
tate, in their business enterprise, to run a float- 
ing saloon at sea ; and on these great vessels 
there is gambling unrestrained. And in ad- 
dition to this, an exorbitant rate is charged 
for passage, — more than is just from a Chris- 
tian standpoint ; besides the servants of the ship 
being paid, often underpaid, or, through custom, 
paid by the passengers rather than by the 
company. 

This is only one instance in the business 
world of the contradiction which exists between 
the business man's private life and his public 
life in business enterprise. 

It might be an astonishing revelation to the 
ministers of this city if all of their business 
men would confess the exact facts concerning 
the way in which their money has been 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 297 

made. I believe myself that one of the great 
temptations which face young men to-day in 
our great cities is the temptation to greed, to 
become rich through speculation, to attain 
"success" — a horrid word when it defines 
getting on at the expense of others or the loss 
of character. I believe that this spirit of un- 
christian business methods is a spirit that 
ought to be rebuked by the pulpit fearlessly — 
in the love of God and man, but without fear 
or favor, and that one of the most solemn 
duties which lie upon the ministry to-day is to 
train its young life into ways of Christian 
business habits. No more sacred duty rests 
upon the church and the ministry to-day than 
the duty of cleansing itself from the charge 
of a dual life. And before we praise men for 
their philanthropy in giving sums to carry on 
even religious work, it is our duty to insist 
upon it that money shall be made in clean, 
honest, Christian ways or not at all, and that 
if the Sermon on the Mount cannot be ap- 
plied absolutely to a man's money making, 
there is something wrong, — not with the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, but with the business 
method. 

(4) CHRISTIAN STATESMANSHIP 
There is, in addition to all the rest of the 
opportunities which face us as ministers of 
Christ to-day, the opportunity of training the 



298 NEW WINE SKINS 

young life committed to our care for public 
service. We need to-day in our public life, 
municipal and national, Christian statesmen. 
We have enough politicians. There ought to 
be a school for the training of men in Chris- 
tian political life. I do not know but the 
time is coming very soon when the theologi- 
cal seminaries will have connected with them 
chairs of applied Christian ethics, as related to 
the highest forms of statesmanship ; and the 
best thing we can do, perhaps, in the next 
ten years, would be to send men out of our 
Christian colleges and seminaries equipped for 
the purpose of holding office in municipal places 
of trust, in halls of legislation, in Congress, and 
everywhere else. The ministry of to-day has 
a wonderful opportunity before it as it faces 
this great need. 

(5) CHRISTIAN JOURNALISM 
There is also an opportunity facing the 
church to-day, which I believe it will see and 
will use, to organize and endow Christian 
journalism. In a town or small city of fifteen 
or twenty or ten thousand people, containing 
eight or ten or more churches, why should not 
these churches combine their wealth and influ- 
ence, which often are very large, to establish 
a distinctively Christian daily paper. There is 
wealth enough in a city like Boston, in the 
churches alone, to organize and carry on sue- 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 299 

cessfully a paper which would stand every day 
of its life for positive Christian life. I do not 
mean simply a paper that would have good 
things in it, but a paper that would have a 
positive program for the positive building up of 
the Kingdom of God in this world ; as clear 
and definite a purpose to advocate righteousness 
in every part of life as the minister is supposed 
to have in the ministry, or the church is sup- 
posed to have in the community. It would be 
a paper which would not contain whisky adver- 
tisements, or any other that were contrary to 
the will of God ; a paper that would be in the 
largest and truest sense free from all unneces- 
sary and narrow political bias ; a paper where 
the editors and reporters were all profoundly 
consecrated, spiritual-minded men and women, 
whose one great purpose was to use the entire 
paper for the building up of the Kingdom of 
God ; a paper that would not be dominated by 
the power of money, that would represent the 
whole life of the nation, and stand for all that 
was good and true and holy in all relations of 
man to man. 

If the churches of this city, or any other city 
in this country, realized their real power in the 
matter of wealth sufficiently to carry on such 
a paper, and in the matter of ability to equip 
it and make it what it ought to be, I do not 
know that there is any other one agency which 



300 tKElV WINE SKINS 

the church might produce more powerful to 

help the cause of Christ in the world to-day. 

(6) ORGANIZED YOUTH 

With all the rest that we have mentioned, 
there is still another opportunity, the most 
helpful of all before the ministry and the church 
of to-day. This is the training of its young life 
in the service of God. That which my father 
did not have, or did not realize that he had, 
we to-day possess. 

There are a great many young men in the 
ministry, in the Middle West, who are begin- 
ning to ask themselves whether it is not the 
part of wisdom to discontinue the second 
preaching service and put all their time and 
strength and energy into the training of their 
young men and women for service. 

I wish that the brethren could see the letters 
which I have received during the last two 
years from men who are asking that very 
question, and who, as they confront the prob- 
lem of the second preaching service, are be- 
ginning to reach out for the source of future 
strength and life in their parish and church. 
As a practical thing, will you let me say, as 
a part of my own experience for the last four 
years, I have found the best part of my own 
ministry has been along this line. Instead of 
preaching another sermon to people who have 
already had one, I have asked my church to 



OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE THE CHURCH 301 

let me give all my strength and time to the 
young people in their Sunday evening service. 
The result I fully believe will warrant the wis- 
dom of this course in scores and hundreds of 
churches similar to mine. At any rate, the 
number of inquiries which come from all parts 
of the country concerning this very use of 
strength is some indication of what is going on 
in the minds of men in the ministry who are 
struggling after the best ways of using their 
own time and strength. I see no hope in any 
large way for the future of the church or the 
nation or the world, unless it comes through 
the children — the boys and girls, the young 
men and women, over whom we have an in- 
fluence to-day. The older men and women in 
our churches too often have their own views 
and political and social habits fixed by long 
years of custom. Very many ministers find 
that their influence over the men in their con- 
gregation stops short when it comes to Chris- 
tian ethics in politics and business. The 
younger men and women, with minds and 
hearts responsive to the truths of applied 
Christian life, in the business and Christian 
world of to-day are the hope of the coming 
century. If we cannot impress upon them the 
necessity for a Christian life,' what hope can 
we have of the future for our churches or our 
country ! 



302 ${EIV WINE SKINS 

It is a wonderful privilege to be a Christian 
to-day — to be ministers of the gospel of Christ 
and members of his body. It carries with it 
to-day a responsibility, together with a privi- 
lege, such as disciples did not have fifty years 
ago. With all the burdens of the life of the 
present day resting upon us ; with all the dif- 
ficulties which confront us in our church and 
national life ; with all the sin and shame of 
great cities, of which I am sure we are not 
often too conscious ; with all the spirit of greed 
which perhaps is the master evil of the day ; 
with all that seems to be discouraging and 
hopeless as we face the daily conflict of good 
and bad — there never was so great an age in 
which to live, and never so wonderful a pro- 
gram as the one which lies before the church 
of Jesus at the opening of the new century. 

God help us to be men who see the facts, who 
are not afraid of the conflict, who do not hold our 
places through fear of any man, who are not 
afraid to put the life of Jesus to the test any- 
where ; and who, in pulpit or in pew, realize that 
the church and the ministry of to-day do not 
mean anything unless they mean the knowledge 
of opportunities and the use of power to make 
possible the Kingdom of God in the world. That 
is what we are here for. May God help us to 
realize the meaning of the ministry of the new 
century. 



JAN 38 \m 



Mm 

,8 



